


left to ponder your devotions

by Tohje



Series: Visions made of flesh and light [3]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anakin's master collection is complemented, Angst and Feels, Don't copy to another site, Fix-It, M/M, Mutual Pining, Romance, So much pining I'm starting a tree farm, That's SO Not How The Force Works, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-06-29 17:45:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19835365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tohje/pseuds/Tohje
Summary: Separation under the Trial of Attachment makes the hearts grow even fonder, and leads to disturbing discoveries. Shared Trial means shared sacrifices, and the Force is relentless in its demands.(goddamn I hate these from the bottom of my heart.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third, and final part of Visions made of flesh and light. Visions will be complete after this fic. The previous parts are called the reason i come alive, and wipe the sweat from my brow (get to rely on you).
> 
> antheiasilva, you're simply incomparable.
> 
> LuvEwan, I couldn't ask for a better enabler. My writer self-esteem wouldn't be half this good without you.
> 
> Italics denote thoughts, <> denote mind speech.

Not passion but compassion.

 _Com -_ means “with.”

What kind of withness would that be?

Anne Carson, _Glass, Irony & God _

  
1.

He dreamed.

Mostly about hands.

Impossibly warm hands, large knuckles and a gentle hold. He woke up shivering from the cold, no matter how many blankets he hoarded during the night.

“Why are Jedi dreams so damn loud?” the boy whined, eyes crossed from sleepiness, gripping a steaming cup of caf with both hands the following morning. The teapot rattled against the counter - sloppy of Obi-Wan - and Anakin added hastily, “I didn’t peek, I swear. I can’t, not now when you have your shields up. It just that they ache my teeth. Like master’s dream aches my chest.”

“You shouldn’t drink that black tar at your age. Corrodes you,” Obi-Wan answered mildly and flicked on the HoloNet. 

“And you shouldn’t use the Force in a frivolous manner.”

“Good thing there’s no master here to reproach me.”

“Yeah. Because we both think that’s a _good_ thing,” the boy muttered, and for a recently-turned-ten-year-old who loudly condemned irony, he was getting fairly competent at it. 

In the HoloNet broadcast they played the last evening on repeat: Depa Billaba, collapsing impressively in the middle of this month’s great Senate session where Jedi representatives stood in a ceremonial role. The broadcast switched over to the serene face of Ki-Adi Mundi, surrounded by microphones, sun-reflecting lenses and yelling journalists. 

“He’s sweating. He’s stroking his beard because he wants to cover it,” Anakin commented idly. 

“Impertinent.” 

On the screen, Cerean master announced that master Billaba’s state was stable, but that the danger was far from over. The Galactic Senate, and its adjacent 24/5 following holo channels, would see some changes in the regular Jedi faces they were used to. The Head of the Order would withdraw to ensure his former padawan’s wellbeing and to lead an investigation of this attack here at the centre of the Republic. 

_“I thought you guys didn’t have families!”_ one of the more raucous journalists hollered gleefully. _“Are you telling us that master Mace Windu actually feels for somebody?”_

_“Are they lovers?”_ came the second yell. 

_“What about this secret new padawan he supposed to have but nobody has seen?”_ interrupted the third.

On the screen, Ki-Adi Mundi looked at the journalists down his prominent nose in a dignified silence. The flip of the Force turned channel mute. 

“I’m starting to understand why master is always extra cranky after public sessions,” Anakin mused, nurturing his caf. “They are worse than the stallholders in Mon Espa.”

“Master Windu has a lot of experience handling them,” Obi-Wan assured him.

“Is master Depa alright though?” 

“Yes, from what I heard from Onossa. They overdid it a bit, but it’s not serious. She should be upright and her usual terrifying self in no time.”

“I still don’t get why you call her terrifying.”

“You’re too young to see past the lovely facade. Your sister-padawan puts the fear of the Force into all of us. Which I’m about to do to _you_ if you’re late again from your morning meditation classes,” Obi-Wan threatened. 

“You’re not my master,” Anakin pouted, but he was already pulling his outer tunics in place.

“No, but they entrusted your care to me until master Windu returns, so I have all their prestige and none of the scowl-wrinkles and grey hair.” 

Anakin re-emerged from his tunic’s neckline with a shrewd look on his face. “I’ll be on time if you are. I know you have physical therapy this morning.”

Obi-Wan sighed, a tad exaggerated. Anakin, wise beyond his years every now and then, left it at that. 

“For all they claim to be spe-cia-li-zed,” Anakin spelled out the fast running commentary in Basic at the bottom of the screen, “to the ‘Jedi-Republic -relations’, they don’t even know my master’s basic behavior pattern. Like hells master Mace would recede if somebody had actually attacked master Depa. He would stay at the spotlight and challenge those cowards and not leave a stone unturned until he found them. That’s what I would do.”

“If somebody had actually attacked master Billaba, you wouldn’t even know. They wouldn’t let that go out public like that. It’s a smokescreen; he’s too much of a figurehead just to vanish to some random Outer Rim mission. The Council shared with us what was going to happen so that you wouldn’t be scared.” _And I bet my silka beads they wanted to draw attention elsewhere. Make Jedi look like we are unaware and moving onto other threats._

Anakin skittered out of the door with a hasty goodbye. Obi-Wan drowned his scalding tea in one go to clear the lingering fog in his head. Mornings weren’t hard for him, although he most assuredly did not share Qui-Gon’s enthusiasm to get up together with the sunrise to commune with the lifeforms fanciful and mundane alike. But ever since Anakin had temporarily moved into Jinn/Kenobi quarters, dreams found their way to the waking world.

(Wasn’t it convenient, him responsible for a young padawan, not to move out just yet, but to remain here, sleeping on the couch, draping Qui-Gon’s Force signature around him like one of the blankets. Still smelling his former master every morning, sapir and shaving cream and earth, a rarity in Coruscant.) 

The Force carried a sense of unrealness around him and Anakin; an echo from the prescience whose time had come and gone. He wasn’t sure whether had it come to pass or not. He woke up on several mornings with a sense of a mutilating loss digging its dirty claws into his chest, and _pulling_. Unescaped tears prickled in the corners of his eyes, but when he tried to reason _why,_ they dissolved like a morning mist in the sun.

Sometimes he looked across the room at Anakin, leaning over the desk in the padawan room that was his not so long ago, scrunching his nose at the astrophysics homework, and the Force gave him a glimpse of another boy, warier and closed off, rippling in Anakin’s place. 

It gave him a headache, added into his attached dreams and exhaustion, which seemed his everyday companions now that therapists, healers and salle masters had gotten him in their clutches once again. Anakin had looked at him oddly more than once. 

The Force nudged and warned but when he tried to listen, it played hide-and-seek with his mind until he could practically hear it giggling like a frisky crecheling hiding from the adults. 

He was running late again. 

***

This was Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi’s course of the day.

Physical therapy in the mornings, after he sent Anakin on his way. The therapy rooms were airy, with wide windows that opened to one of the main atriums near the planet’s current, highest pedestrian level. He told himself they didn’t bother him, the windows. 

It was amazing what almost four months of immobility and damage to your core on a midichlorian level did to your body. The rooms were eerily quiet most of the time, save his occasional grunts of discomfort, his Rodian therapist gulping up to him. There were other patients, but they were all locked up in their separate bubbles, avoiding eye contact, barriers constructed out of fatigue and frustration. The fitted carpet ensured that the light-footed healers moved soundlessly from patient to patient, talking to them in hushed tones.

The first appointment had ended with an assisted stumbling back to the quarters, followed by an ocean-heavy sleep through the day until Anakin returned from his lessons. Things were relatively better now. As long as he got his uncooperative body down to the steam baths and tucked it into some secluded, vaporous corner, it usually placated his limbs from tremors, and he managed to continue his day.

The price was, well, not _humiliation_ , but a very public vulnerability. It was nothing Jedi frowned upon, in itself, as a certain percentage of them encountered serious injuries sooner or later in their careers. And really, what was the alternative, hole up in the quarters? 

Obi-Wan knew of the looks. He could feel them on his skin when he sat on the bench, eyes closed, sweating, hair plastered onto his skull, willing his body to heal. Subtle glances, curious brushes of Force-fingers, murmured conversations. His nosy Order was worrying in an almost endearing way. 

Many elder members of the Order shared a tendency to lose sleep after they reached a certain age, and so they gathered to the steam baths early in the morning hours. They perched on the higher benches, all shapes and sizes, faces wrinkled, round and beautiful. “ _Was the young knight alright, broadcasting that sort of profound tiredness instead of normal, serene presence? Wasn’t that Kenobi? You heard the Council knighted him recently, right? No, they still haven’t confirmed anything from that high spire of theirs, but the little birds sang that Kenobi didn’t have to attend to the Trials after their conspicuous Naboo mission. He is obviously still in a bad shape after the coma, so what else it could be but…? The birds also warbled that his master had basically vanished into thin air after so many weeks of sticking to his padawan’s bedside like a gluttonbug. Left courseworks ungraded and all.”_

He shook his head, acutely aware of the thin braid not swinging along. Anakin endured this, so should he. _How_ did the child endure it, with that dark-alluring supernova Force-presence of his, with even the Head of the Order glowering grimly over his head? 

Adults should never forget some things, namely the children’s ability for cruelty, and yet they did, yet Obi-Wan had let himself forget.

The Force nipped and nudged him, impish.

To the watch duty.

Most of the days he got a glimpse of Anakin in the refectory, surrounded by the older initiates because he had most of his classes with them. If Garen or Bant were at the Temple, which was rare, they accompanied Obi-Wan. Garen’s Trials were just round the corner, and Bant’s master often sent her to the short excursions to the medical facilities around the Core worlds and Mid Rim.

He didn’t mind the solitude. Anakin didn’t seem to mind either, for every now and then he joined him, slamming his tray down in a way that earned reproachful looks from the masters to _Obi-Wan,_ for Force’s sake - and yet again the Force did that annoying overlap of the past-that-never-was for a few seconds - and announced dramatically that he was “world-weary.” Obi-Wan merely raised his brow. They ate in companionable silence. When Obi-Wan finally queried the reason of the padawan’s weariness, Anakin just waved his hand to the general direction of the other initiates, like it would explain everything. 

“They are picking on you?”

Anakin was honestly startled.

“What?!” he exclaimed. “No, they are just...difficult to understand. I didn’t realize before how much they compete for the adults’ attention. Some of them think I have it in spades. They think I’m ungrateful.” He shrugged. “I tried to avoid scrutiny, before, so I didn’t get it at first. I deal with it.” 

Obi-Wan had a niggling suspicion that a child who was a former slave viewed bullying somewhat differently than a Temple-raised initiate, but if Anakin didn’t feel he needed help, it was good for him to solve these situations on his own.

“I just miss Kitster sometimes. I know I shouldn’t,” the boy mumbled. 

Obi-Wan sighed and let his fork fall. He didn’t have much appetite anyway nowadays. It made Onossa fret.

“Come on,” he said quietly. “I reserved one of the smaller salles this afternoon.”

Anakin’s eyes brightened. The promise of saber drills never failed on that account. 

Eyes followed them from the refectory to the salles. Polite, concerned, averted eyes. 

Between the easier shii-cho katas, Anakin opened up in bits and pieces about his disappearance a fortnight ago. He knew his master and Qui-Gon were about to meet his mother on his mission (and seven Siths, didn’t that make the hair in Obi-Wan’s neck to stand up in warning). It had been a hard lesson for Anakin - the one Obi-Wan was unsure was completed - to let go of his resentment and disappointment because he wasn’t allowed to accompany the mission. It was surprising, however, to learn alongside the parries and footwork corrections that Anakin had actually been given permission to send her a few records. It was such a small thing, and yet it went against the tradition of hundreds of years. Master Windu Obi-Wan knew had never been this… change-oriented.

When he had first heard of Depa’s election to the Council, he had thought it a tradition preserving choice. He wasn’t so sure anymore.

_Disturbances._ The Force whirled merrily around the focused young padawan.

He should ask Onossa for something for his headaches.

Anakin threw himself into learning katas with reckless abandon. He concentrated much better while moving, Obi-Wan soon found out, and had that spark of raw talent which promised to turn into a bonfire if properly tended. For a child so on his toes in his everyday life, adapting and adapting, he let something loose on the training mat. The first resulting, uncontrolled energy surge in the Force was something to behold, and Obi-Wan caught four more after their first session, when he was better prepared.

You could practically hear the chin wagging starting the minute they were out of sight. After the first incident, he made sure to inform the salle master of their reservations beforehand. 

He resolutely ignored the tremors caused by him playing catch-and-release with Anakin’s Force-bursts, and the boy was too preoccupied with the katas to notice.

“You saw something cool and decided to give it a try, didn’t you,” Obi-Wan sighed when their hour neared its end and Anakin was circling him with a wooden bokken, trying to find a hole in Obi-Wan’s defence. Anakin had tried to flip backwards, Force-assisted (Obi-Wan kept his thoughts tightly to himself about the fact that a ten-year-old with a few months of training even _knew_ how to rely on the Force like that). Anakin had tried to get outside of Obi-Wan’s range, and landed somewhat standing but unbalanced.

Anakin grinned. Something coiled tight in Obi-Wan’s chest. 

“It’s the same as in pod race. It lets me know I can try something. It doesn’t always succeed, but it never completely fails either.”

Oh, overconfident little brat. Obi-Wan snorted, half irritation, half amusement, and proceeded to give the young padawan a lesson, convalescence be damned.

It wasn’t long until Anakin yelled “Solah, solah!” a small hand thumping on the mat, eyes over-bright.

Master Windu had arranged private tutoring for Anakin three times a week in the evenings, to help him catch up with his agemates and, Obi-Wan suspected, to ease him into the Temple-lifestyle and Jedi philosophy. The boy didn’t complain; he was used to working hard in abnormal hours, though the academic strain he was under manifested in outbursts of frustration and flying objects. The first time he had witnessed it, Obi-Wan had been baffled. It was so _unexpected. Unpolite. Un-padawanlike._ Anakin’s outbreaks were never directed to anybody; the flying books never brushed Qui-Gon’s treasured plants, let alone Obi-Wan himself. Anakin had so much energy, it had to go somewhere when the exasperation hit, and releasing his feelings and vexations into the Force didn’t come naturally to him at all.

A memory of an unfulfilled prescience had raced up his spine, and before he’d recognized the situation, his reproach had already been harsher than he meant it to be. Anakin’s eyes flashed mutinously.

_Force, if I had had to deal with this if Qui-Gon passed._ He had softened his tone a fraction, admitting that Anakin had surprised him, and the boy had squinted and muttered his own apologies.

So, three nights a week found Obi-Wan standing among the lengthening shadows at the salles. Open-handed ataru left him panting and defeated for the first time as long as he could remember. The recuperation wasn’t the problem; Qui-Gon had taught him to respect his boundaries whenever possible a long time ago, since it was a presumption in their line of duty that these moments were few and far between. He slowed down the katas to half-speed, even to quarter speed. The sequences, the flow of the movement, he could still reach them through moving meditation and sheer familiarity. He wasn’t floundering, he wasn’t regressing. 

The problem was that now, when he moved through the exercises, he had started to see possible openings at every turn and twist of his body. Vulnerabilities. Ataru was so forthcoming, relying on endurance and unexpectedness in the form of somersaults and acrobatics which demanded supreme stamina. 

_He’s out there, and he’s not completely restored to health. What was the Council thinking? Why is this need of secrecy so great that it surpasses the need to preserve life?_

He resisted the urge to switch on a practise droid and take his frustration out on it. He respected the _boundaries,_ every single one of them _._ He was respecting the kriff out of them.

Before his knighting, the future had always been a blur. He was aiming for the Trials, for knighthood, and couldn’t afford to think very far past them. He would serve to the best of his ability; he would go where the Force and the Order would send him. But after that fateful night, which he couldn’t bear to think about more than in passing, a new dream had sprung to life.

He told himself he wasn’t concentrating on the present moment, but on the future that actually depended on his success in this present moment, on this challenge laid out in front of him. 

He needed grounding. He needed…needed to be able to guard, to shelter, and to be aware and calm in his surroundings so that he would never be left behind again. 

It was woolgathering, he knew. A Jedi couldn’t always control the circumstances, and death snapped its jaws at their heels, always greedy, always mouth full of yellow, rotting teeth. But seven times damned Sith, he would be better prepared, next time. 

To summarize, he concluded, lying on his back on the mat, chest heaving and sweating through his tunics, he needed soresu. 

***

This was knight Obi-Wan Kenobi’s course of the day, _truthfully_. 

He woke up. He didn’t think of the dreams. He dressed himself in the serene mask of knighthood just to get himself and Anakin through the day. He practised, he watched over, he guided, he feinted his ever-lurking fatigue, he tried to heal (and could feel the ghost of the gimer stick for his choice of words). 

He stayed up long after Anakin had gone to bed, leaving half-finished letters to his holopad. ~~_Master_~~ _Qui-Gon. We have both settled, Anakin and I._ _I ~~still sleep on the couch though.~~ _ _You can assure master Windu that he is doing fine. His discipline isn’t at the required level, but that is to be expected. He is a firecracker, master, and I already feel like gloating over you when you have to keep up with him in the following years._

_I’m back at the salles at last, but considering some changes. I mean no disrespect, merely trying out new pathways, like the experimental new knight I am. Though it doesn’t feel much like I’m a knight until this convalescence is finally over,_ ~~_but more like you’ve gone to a solo mission and I’m just passing time and finishing chores, waiting for my master to return._~~

_~~I miss you like I would miss my footing in the Galaxy where gravity doesn’t suddenly reign anymore~~ _ _but I can hear you chiding me on not concentrating in the moment, to my body’s needs all the way from there, so that’s what I’m going to do._

He wasn’t used to this, how the letters hung unfinished. He completed things that he set his mind to, used his considerable, Qui-Gon Jinn matching levels of determination to achieve his goals and assignments. That the simple letter thwarted him was intolerable. Garen would laugh until his stomach hurt when he came back.

He knew how those seemingly innocuous little words framed something unvoiced.

He retreated to his evening meditations, releasing his frustration and other, unnamed things which really didn’t have place in the life of a knight under the Trial. 

His mistake, he learned later. Unnamed things were powerful, he really should have known by now. To know a true name was to make a thing, a feeling manageable. Instead, they crept back after he had fallen asleep, beckoned and led him through half-formed dreamscenery until he reached their intended destination.

The unspoken, foggy things showed him his master. Qui-Gon sat in meditation, eyes closed, peaceful and far-away. Around them, a general impression of the Temple garden, rather than some specific location, arranged itself, shadowy and lush with greenery, shifting restlessly. 

Obi-Wan settled without a fuss, resigned, and lowered himself next to Qui-Gon on the dark grass. The quiet, grey-hued light coming from nowhere seemed to gather around his master, playing in his hair and closed eyelids. Obi-Wan’s mind was too skilled when it came to distraction; Qui-Gon’s Force presence, though muted, felt almost too accurate in the dream. 

The shriveled bond ached in the distance. 

Obi-Wan lay down and crossed his hands behind his head, staring upwards. The dream garden hummed, and dream Qui-Gon, which his too-clever-for-its-own-good mind had conjured up next to him, thrummed with it, deceptively consolidated, offering comfort. 

“Voss of you, Obi-Wan,” the dream Qui-Gon commented, voice dry. Obi-Wan gave a little wave, not bothering to uncross his hands. 

“Says the figment of my subconscious who found his way to _my_ dreaming.”

He knew dream Qui-Gon had opened his eyes without turning his head for confirmation. The intensity of his dream master’s stare felt like a hundred tiny, tickling feet running up and down his arms. The sensation was quite true to the waking world. 

“Did I?” Qui-Gon’s voice was quiet. It would have drowned in the hum of the garden if not for some odd, husky quality in it. Obi-Wan’s mind was truly playing trickster tonight.

“Am I this impolite often, invading your dreams?”

“Not invading,” Obi-Wan rushed to assure. “This is the best part of my day, no mistake. I usually don’t even get to see you this clearly. Mostly just your hands. Sometimes more, if I’m lucky.”

The wind in the grass whispered. The impression of the Temple-Garden wavered like the scenery was underwater.

“I apologize,” Obi-Wan said, feeling somewhat ridiculous, asking forgiveness from his own subconscious. “I’m presuming things.”

Qui-Gon smiled, an utterly familiar half-curve of his mouth twinging Obi-Wan’s stomach. The odd light softened the intensive blue in Qui-Gon’s eyes. “It makes me lightheaded, to hear you say these things, even if in a dream. Although I’m sorry to hear your old master’s dream company is the best part of your day. The beginning of a knighthood is a trying, lonely time, and yours is more strenuous than is usually the case.”

Obi-Wan scoffed at his master’s self-deprecating remark, in a way he wouldn’t have even imagined in the waking world a few weeks or even days before. “It’s funny,” he said. “After all this time. It was one, golden, shiny moment, so full it burst out of its seams. But now, the knighthood feels like an everlasting waiting room.” He shook his head, trying to banish the echoes. “Then again, it could be filled with ash.”

Dream Qui-Gon’s focus shifted.

“What do you mean?”

Obi-Wan shrugged, unsure how to put his impressions into words. “An unfilled prescience, I suppose. It hovers over things. Lingers. I have never felt anything like it. Mostly it’s Anakin. Different Anakin. From.. from what you asked me to do. Sometimes other things. Other me. Ash everywhere, from your pyre. And that black box inside me is alive and well, and I think everything is alright and how it should be. I don’t allow Anakin to see me, I don’t allow anything else but duty.” He never seemed to remember this while awake. Just lingering sadness instead. It was grimly amusing, that he was more enlightened in his dreams than in the waking world. 

“It didn’t happen, thanks to you. Let it go.”

“How can you know?” Obi-Wan threw himself up and glowered at his former master. “You’re out there thanks to the Council’s gamble, and you’re **not** recovered. What if it’s a new precognition? What if I just delayed it?” His tumultuous feelings added to the dreamscape’s ripples, making them swell. 

“I’m safely tucked on-board the _Agile_ with Mace, trying to meditate on serenity in passion but apparently I’ve fallen asleep. Most unusual. In this moment, padawan, there’s no ground for your worry. You know how our pledge is. Our future is what the Force dictates,” Qui-Gon admonished gently.

His former maverick master opposed the Council and pledges to anything but to the Force all the damn time, _why_ he was bowing his head now? 

“Well, if you come to any conclusion in your meditation, do a kindness and let me know, because mine has failed spectacularly,” Obi-Wan grunted. Force, did the headache have to follow him into his dreams too? 

Qui-Gon sighed. “I’m afraid I have to disappoint you. I find this new thing between you and me far too much alluring to have a proper control over it.” The half-smile was there and gone in an instant. “You’re very fascinating, knight Kenobi. As with anything new, understanding and mastering it don’t happen instantly. The control demands meditations, discipline, adapting.”

“I find myself reluctant to rein it in. Force, I _miss -_ ,” Obi-Wan cut himself off. It didn’t do any good. 

Qui-Gon’s hand twitched towards Obi-Wan, seemingly of its own volition, and Qui-Gon glanced at it like it had slightly affronted him. “I can’t allow this to flow unrestricted, the mission needs my concentration and you make me -” He halted and visibly gathered his thoughts. “I’m glad my heart is safe at the moment, even though it will be out there in the wild space in no time, making a name for himself, I’m sure.” 

“Master.” Obi-Wan bowed his head, chastised and flustered in equal measure. Then his head snapped up and he sought Qui-Gon’s gaze as the realization dawned on him. 

“Wait. You said you fell asleep on _Agile._ You’ve meditated feverish and with extreme blood loss, you’ve never fallen asleep before. And I’m asleep in the Temple.”

Qui-Gon’s eyes widened. This time his hand rose intentionally. Obi-Wan lunged forward and for a fleeting moment, their hands touched. Their Force presences rushed to meet, mingling like two tookas, rubbing against each other in greeting and purring contentedly. The sensation exchange was instant: the ever-constant hum of the hyperdrive, claustrophobic feeling of the fast, smallish courier shuttle, the dull stiffness of joints caused by falling asleep while in meditation pose.

_ <Obi-Wan.> _The phantom pain raced along the severed training bond.

< _Qui-Gon. It's really you. > _

<Y _ou’re… you’re so much, Obi-Wan. Too much. I have to retreat. > _

< _Anything. You do anything that keeps you safe. > _

< _Focus on your healing, Obi-Wan. Focus on your first solo missions. Hold my heart for safekeeping. > _

Qui-Gon was being so gentle, so melancholy; it was undoing him. 

< _Please be- > _

The dream drained, like someone had overturned a bowl of water in the sink. Obi-Wan woke up with a flinch. A crick in his neck announced in no uncertain terms that he had fallen asleep in an awkward position. In the next room, Anakin tossed in his bed behind a firmly closed door, in the midst of a colorful, unfocused dream. The boy was borderline obsessed with his own privacy and space.

Nighttime Coruscant twinkled and winked outside the half-shut blinds.

The single, golden thread between him and Qui-Gon, already stretched impossibly thin by the growing distance, had finally snapped. It stung on his fingers in the Force like a breaking rubber band. An irritating itch, that’s all.

He rose, ignited the Alderaanian lantern and finished the damned letter.


	2. Chapter 2

“Master Mace and master Qui-Gon missed my nameday.”

“Jedi don’t place much value on those things.”

“I guessed. Just thought they might want to know. ‘Twas silly.”

Master Depa clearly didn’t believe in chairs. Anakin, sitting on a plush meditation cushion, didn’t have a clue how the shortish master reached her upper kitchen cupboards. Or how she had hung the long, colorful, clinking wing chimes, which reflected the the setting sun in the rainbow spectre.

Maybe she too used the Force in a frivolous manner.

Then again, maybe not. It was hard to believe that, when master Depa sat there all serene, wonderful colors chasing each other on her face with the breeze. 

They said this spring was unseasonably warm. Anakin wasn’t exactly freezing anymore, but this massive mausoleum Jedi called home didn’t warm overnight. 

“Anakin?”

“I apologize, master Depa,” he came back to the present moment. Meditating. Ew. He still sucked at it. His thoughts skittered like a harassed herd of womp rats, every one to the different direction. 

“Meditation doesn’t come to you when you grit your teeth. The sound scares it away. Why do you think you have to excel at everything at once, padawan?”

Anakin shrugged. “Chosen One’s have to?”

Master Depa muttered something in a language Anakin didn’t know. He could read between the lines well enough though. 

“It… it makes me angry when I’m not? If… if I was, it would be easier to master Mace?” he offered, more lamely this time. 

“Don’t presume to know his mind yet, young one.” 

Anakin looked at master Depa under his brow, but refrained valiantly from saying anything.

“Now, as I was saying before you started to daydream, they very well might want to know, actually. How did you imagine it, if the Galaxy was a kinder place and you masters could be here to celebrate?”

Master Depa absolutely didn’t give anything away. It felt like a chit chat after a long day. She kept her face towards the setting sun, eyes closed, her words idle. Anakin knew they were anything but. The Jedi taught the same way the wandering scribes did (training salles excluded); they used stories and allr- allegories, riddles and logical traps in conversations. 

He had never been particularly good at those gatherings, sitting among the other children in the settling evening dust and listening quietly, often coming to conclusions long after the wittier kids had started giggling.

“We... would just be together. Master Obi-Wan too. He would be alright too. We… we could eat supper together? I could make mom’s tagine. You know, before everybody has to go as usual. Just one evening.” Anakin described, not sure of the rules this time (anytime, really. Could people here just say what they meant, what they wanted? Master Obi-Wan was the _worst_ on that.) “I could probably send a holo record to mom again,” he finished sullenly, knowing _that_ at least was definitely the wrong answer.

Master Depa opened her eyes. Across her face shifted the colors purple, yellow, green, yellow again. The chimes tinkled, sounding chiding to Anakin’s ears.

“You have much to learn about each other, still. Mace gave your present to me, to hand it over to you if you answered my questions correctly, considering your latest, long lesson.”

Oh. The lesson-of-latching-on, as Anakin called it in his head. Master Mace had explained, again and again, how Anakin clung to people too much, how he had hurt himself and others with that. He tried, he really did. It was just that... his mom… And his masters were gone now. It wasn’t _right_ that he was here _,_ he was a padawan.

“I’m still a work in progress, ain’t I?” he muttered. He wondered how disappointed his master would be if he never succeeded in this lesson too. Because, well, his _mom._ And his masters. And even master Obi-Wan. And, for some reason, the Force thrilled a little and showed him Padmé.

He never knew birthday presents came with clauses. Jedi were odd (wrong. Different?) 

“Everybody is,” master Depa answered cryptically. “Your answer wasn’t something I expected. I think I’ll give you your present now. Master Mace has tried to teach you that we Jedi especially don’t always get what we want, even the most important things to us. We sacrifice much for the Republic. Or, like masters like master Qui-Gon prefer, for the will of the Force. Your sacrifice was your nameday celebration, this time.” 

Anakin shrugged. The Republic was a shapeless, indifferent blob. The Force often did his bidding and sometimes straightforwardly used him without his permission in turn, in ways that scared and exhilarated him, but it rarely demanded anything of him. Maybe it was like the Jedi, telling him things sideways, and he wasn’t very good at listening?

“That’s all right, as sacrifices go,” he assured master Depa. “Now that I know they knew about it, it’s enough. They thought of me, it’s nice.” 

Master Depa presented a small hypershear. It was modest, practical, nothing spectacular. Anakin had broken his old one a few weeks before. He didn't think his master had noticed, and he had been too busy anyway to ask for a new one.

“Neat!” he exclaimed. Master Depa tsked, and Anakin blushed. “I mean, thank you master Billaba, for keeping it safe for me.”

“Master Qui-Gon gave me a few credits for safe keeping too, and asked me to tell you to go to the Merchant district to get some of those fire-ginger sweets you like.”

They _had_ thought of him. Master Qui-Gon had even given him own money. He hid the thoughts deep deep deep inside, feeling the blush spreading, and tried to concentrate on the meditation.

***

_“I miss you like I would miss my footing in the Galaxy where gravity doesn’t suddenly reign anymore.”_

Ataru’s seventh kata’s basic defence stance, parry, parry again from the bottom-right.

The connection was gone, unraveled by the last night. 

Forced retreat in front of a master Bulq’s reversed attack of the preying avian. Gain the momentum back, mind the cramped surroundings. Make them work for you.

_“Where gravity doesn’t suddenly reign anymore.”_

Answer. Pressure. Jung su ma, adapted counter chrono-wise, starting high which isn’t usually expected.

Small spasm on the scar tissue reaching out to his armpit. Upper rotation a mistake. Squelch the reaction, don’t let it show. Distract, advance, turn the attention elsewhere.

_“I miss you.”_

Otherwise, the arrived hololetter was a paradigm of propriety. 

Hum of the violet blade on his neck.

“Solah,” Qui-Gon admitted gruffly. 

Mace deactivated his saber and glanced around them. _Agile_ was a courier shuttle, designed for speed and subtlety; its cargo hold was small and low-roofed. Brand new scorch marks decorated the ceiling.

“Identification and observation only, Qui-Gon.” 

“You know me Mace, doing what I must and yielding to the Council’s machinations one stealthy Sith mission at the time.” In fact, he had fought long and loud against the secrecy in the Council briefing, all the time sensing Obi-Wan waiting patiently at the hangar instead of being off and celebrating his knighting with his friends. The Council hadn’t yielded. They appealed to the panicked masses and to the air of paranoia, and all the ugly outcomes of paranoia with which Jedi were deeply familiar.

He could have refused to take the mission. The problem was, he didn’t trust his judgement at the moment. Who would have they sent in his place? Somebody who was not prepared, couldn’t be prepared for this, just because he couldn’t let go of his attachments?

Mace had won him over in the end, promising to go public in the Order the minute they had something concrete to show from Tatooine, any evidence that Maul hadn’t been acting alone. 

The curious thing was, he and Council agreed - wonders never ceased - that the Dark creature had also appeared to be searching. The chilling deduction, the one that had brought the Council to Mace’s - and Depa’s, Qui-Gon suspected - side. The Dark had known about Anakin before them, somehow, they might have even done something deceiving and horrible to the boy, and none of the Jedi had been any wiser before this. _Yoda_ hadn’t been any wiser. His vision had been clouded when it came to Shmi and Anakin Skywalker, if Mace’s foreboding was right.

“Credit for your thoughts,” Mace said, broadcasting a deliberate air of nonchalance. He flicked a nonexisting dust particle from his saber hilt. “It has been some time since I bested you that easily.”

Not to admit he had been distracted would have been an outrageous lie. Qui-Gon chose to remain silent. As a youngling, Mace could never stand quietness, his impatience getting ahead of him. Why stay silent when you could be correcting things and gentlebeings already, making them _right_? 

Time was as relentless teacher as master T’ra Saa had been, and Mace was better now. Somewhat. Nevermind all his years at the Council.

“There’s a long journey ahead of us. I’ll get it under control,” Qui-Gon opted to say. Hyperspace had never been his favorite place to meditate. The Living Force clung to the ship and its sentients which hurled through the anomalies in space and time. In recent years, he had preferred to spend long space travels catching up his reading and napping. (Playing sabacc with Obi-Wan, guiding his studies and keeping him company when the younger man had trouble sleeping.) 

“I suppose the distance is for good. For the Trial and all,” Mace observed impassionately. 

_Took you long enough._

“One would concur,” he acknowledged, matching Mace’s tone. 

“You know I don’t unders-”

“You’re right. You don’t.”

“ - tand, but still, Qui-Gon, whatever other things have given headaches to the Council, you being a neglectful master hasn’t been one of them. Surely you see that the master’s last duty is to set free, to trust their charge’s own judgement and abilities.”

Qui-Gon snorted. “I’ve trusted Obi-Wan in that for years.” 

“Yes well, the releasing is the official seal of approval. For the Council to make it as a Trial… there are eyes on him now, Qui-Gon. They are watching his performance keenly. To see what kind of a shadow the Maverick casts, if his apprentice passes his Trials only to land straight into a new one.”

Qui-Gon bit back his first, instinctive response that this had nothing at all to with the abilities of the young knight, and forced himself to consider. 

He had suspected this. He had wanted to avoid this. Obi-Wan had such promise, such determination, such loyalty to the Order, such carefully controlled fire. He deserved all the chances. Perhaps someday he would even have the chance to change things from inside, something Qui-Gon never had the patience for (or stomach).

_“This unsolidified place in time is mine, to make my own decision for the first time in years, maybe ever. I ask you again, with full intent. Share this place with me.”_

“I trusted his judgement. I showed an explicit faith in him, something I should have done much sooner,” Qui-Gon stated slowly. 

There was something dangerously close to pity in Mace’s dark eyes. 

“If you’re already full, should you accept an offering from the beggar?” Mace asked and raised his hands in defence as Qui-Gon opened his mouth. “A master already has so staggeringly much. And you couldn’t help but ask for more. Have you ever wondered yourself, why it is that you keep asking, no, demanding these things?” _When Jedi shouldn’t ask to keep._

_Because it’s Obi-Wan. He’s so much. Too much, now that we’re out here. He doesn’t belong to me, but he came to me._

You don’t say these things aloud. Not in front of a Councilor, not matter how much the said Councilor is a friend. 

“I should start to prepare myself for this mission,” Qui-Gon hedged. “Excuse me. Meditating in hyperspace is laborious.”

Mace grated his jaw. But it seemed that he, too, wanted to avoid confrontation inside a flying tincan.

“Alright. I need you in your best shape. To trace a Force signature this old, even Dark, might prove nigh impossible, even if we are able to get a memory of it from lady Skywalker. If the Councilors aren’t being…” Mace shook his head. “I leave you to it.”

Mace was right. They didn’t usually send gentlebeings to chase shadows, no, more like whispers of shadows like this. How scared were all of them? 

He knelt down right then and there, in the middle of the shuttle’s narrow cargo. Sweat dried onto his back and face, tasting faintly salty on his lips. The skin of his knuckles was already cracking thanks to the recycled, dry air. His hair needed washing and untangling. He pushed all that aside, slowed his breathing, relaxed his muscles one group at a time. 

The Force showed him the very thing he had been trying to back-burner the whole morning.

_“I miss you like I would miss my footing in the Galaxy where gravity doesn’t suddenly reign anymore._

_The funny thing is, should such an unimaginable catastrophe to happen, I would have to ready myself to lose you anyway, the same way we are ready to protect and shelter those under our protection. It is our way._

_It doesn’t make me miss you less in the slightest.”_

The yearning was a living, feral thing. 

It wasn’t possible to rein in the flood anymore, once it had broken the dam. But it had to be possible to redirect, chart and tame, or he would be lost in this. 

***

Shmi Skywalker had one of the most impressive natural shieldings Qui-Gon had ever come across. She was sitting at the low dining table, discreetly wiping her eyes and drying backs of her hands on her blacksmith’s apron, but her presence in the Force remained unrevealing. He had seen something similar with the Force-sensitive slaves before, but never on this scale. In front of her, the tiny hologram-Anakin seemed to dance in his excitement, bubbling over with his words and impressions, exclaiming every other minute “Mom, this is so _weird_!” 

Tatooine’s suns were nothing but scythes over the horizon line, the last of the day’s oppressive heat rippling away in odd, writhing mirages. Qui-Gon knew they wouldn’t have caught her at home much before this anyway, but when Shmi had opened the front door, she had looked harried and unfocused, bark-brown hair plastered to her forehead, still in her overalls. Watto was running her ragged, then, no doubt in the name of compensating for the loss of her son. 

_You left her here._

Old guilts, the ever-present helplessness and anger. 

She had tried instinctively to shut the door in their faces, to get away from two tall, looming men, before she recognized Qui-Gon. Her oil-stained hand flew to her mouth and her eyes grew large.

“Fear not, lady Skywalker. We don’t bring bad news to your doorstep,” Mace had rumbled.

Her dark eyes calmed when she looked at Mace. “No, but a loss renewed,” she had said simply. 

It wasn’t often that Qui-Gon witnessed Mace Windu stricken speechless. 

She had motioned them inside from the darkening alley. Qui-Gon had made quick introductions, and Shmi invited them to sit around the legless table, starting a latemeal, which had then been abandoned midway as Mace had presented the recordings. Now they sat on the other side of the table, politely turning their heads away from the hurting mother who smiled through her tears at the tinny-sounding image, flickering next to the half-cut karhi roots. 

Mace looked uncomfortable for the tiniest moment, having to face an emotion-ridden situation while crouched over ill-fitting furniture, before Qui-Gon felt him giving his discomfort away to the Force. On their way here - this time from the actual, dingy, sweaty spaceport, whose registration system had taken most of their pilot’s day to wrangle -, hoods raised, Qui-Gon had heard him muttering under his breath how these contacts were forbidden for a _reason,_ for Force’s sake. He had _forebodings._

A memory surfaced without permission. “ _I_ _have a bad feeling about this, master.”_ He turned his head more to the side, towards Shmi’s spice rack, and swallowed.

_Not. Now._

Were his meditations truly so useless nowadays? 

_“The Living Force feeds on compassion, on connection, on_ **_feelings._ ** _This will always be your downfall if you're not careful, padawan.”_

He really should have learned Dooku's lesson better with his own padawans. The words of a master are the only true perpetual-motion-machine in the Galaxy, the pendulum swinging effortlessly between the past and present, blithely ignoring the passed-by years and painstakingly gained experiences. 

“Am I to understand that you’re Ani’s master then, and not master Jinn?” Shmi’s soft words roused Qui-Gon from his wallowing. She was looking at Mace steadily, hands folded together in front of her on the table. Her sabacc face would have made any smuggler jealous. 

Mace bent his head a little. “That’s correct, lady Skywalker. Anakin became my apprentice a few months ago, although master Jinn shares my position in his eyes, I’m sure. He’s currently catching up his age mates at the Coruscant Temple, and I suspect the situation will remain the same for a while yet.”

“And you have a...political stance there, on Coruscant? If I understood my son correctly?”

“You could say that, yes. But only as a representative of my Order.” Qui-Gon would have been more surprised if Shmi or indeed anybody had immediately recognized the Head of the Jedi Order on Tatooine.

Mace’s answer seemed to amuse Shmi. Her eyes glinted, but she didn’t elaborate. She flexed her fingers and shook them. 

“It’s good that you didn’t bring Ani with you, no matter how it pains me,” she said, locking her gaze into Mace’s. Her shielding shimmered, but that was the only sign she was holding something in tight reins. “He needs stability after I let him go into the Galaxy. Boundaries, shelter, new footing. My Ani hasn’t know in his life how to let go of something, not without my help. Will you do that for him now?”

“To my ability, lady Skywalker. It’s a master’s duty, after all,” Mace answered gravely. 

“Ah. You do it for duty. But will you do it for him?”

Qui-Gon couldn’t resist a quiet snort, and Shmi smiled briefly at him, before she returned her attention back to Mace.

“A bond between master and apprentice is sacred to us, even if our utmost loyalty belongs to the Force and no living being or ideal. They become...important to us, even if the people outside of the Order sometimes have trouble recognizing it,” Qui-Gon offered to her.

“My Ani comes from the outside too. Will he be able to understand? That your ways and bonds are different?”

Mace seemed to finally get a grip of the situation. “My peers have accused me of being too frank countless times, lady Skywalker. In this, my padawan and I understand each other. As my padawan, or any padawan of our Order, he faces unique challenges, but he challenges me, every day. I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he rumbled. 

“Enough of this ‘lady.’ It’s silly, in this place and age,” Shmi made a counter-offer and picked up her knife. Something in Mace’s answer had pacified her carefully, but not completely, hidden presence in the Force.

“As you say, ma’am,” Mace said. She shook her knife at him, ghost of a smile on her lips. He remained utterly serene. 

“So,” she stated, with a dry, quiet humor in her voice that Qui-Gon remembered from his last visit, “I have very important postmen sitting at my table, one of them even a _political leader_ from the Core. As wonderful as it is to hear from Anakin, I doubt this is a customary visit to a grieving parent.”

“You remember how I told you how your son is very special in the Force?” Qui-Gon started. 

“I hope you don’t keep repeating that to him instead of ‘good morning.’ Anakin is wonderful, but he doesn’t need to believe himself any more invulnerable than he already does. Flying blind into space battles, guided by your elusive Force? Explosions? Parades? Can I at least trust master Windu to keep him from podracing on Coruscant?”

“If my padawan knows what’s good for him, he doesn’t even dare to dream of such things,” Mace growled. Shmi’s eyes glinted again.

“Yes well,” Qui-Gon continued with haste, “my colleagues in the Order have started to suspect that there are other parties that also have...interests in Anakin. These parties were once thought long extinguished, but apparently that is not the case.”

“A Force compulsion was put on my padawan. It was intricate and foreign to us. We are worried that it’s the work of the Sith, and that it was directed against us, that somebody has used Anakin this way. The Siths are the ancient enemy of the Jedi, and users of the Dark Force,” Mace explained bluntly. 

Shmi stopped her chopping, clutching the knife’s handle. The roots were cut into neat pieces of the same size. “Do you mean mind controlling? That someone has had access to my son’s mind?” she asked quietly. 

_Of course she would associate it with that_ , Qui-Gon thought. _Damn the Hutts and the stain of slavery on our conscience to the icy pits of Hoth._

“For the purposes of this conversation, let’s say it’s close enough, although Anakin might have been used as a tool to influence other minds.” Qui-Gon grimaced inwardly as he realized that he had retreated to the evasive diplomatic register. “Shmi. He’s not in active danger. Master Windu has spent a considerable time dismantling the compulsion. My p- former padawan is taking care of him.”

Shmi released her breath. “Padawan Kenobi? I remember you spoke highly of him. I’m glad to hear Anakin has him on his side.”

Qui-Gon felt Mace’s eyes between his shoulders. He refused to hunch. 

“We need you to sift through your memories, Shmi,” he said levelly. “Was Anakin never missing any extended period of time in his childhood? Do you remember him meeting any stranger, behaving oddly, him not remembering where he had been? Does any of your memories feel clouded concerning him?”

Shmi frowned and put the knife away. “You have to understand that,” a pause, and there it was again, the flexing of her hands, as if they were aching or stiff. Qui-Gon noticed that her knuckles looked slightly swollen. “That I was a young, solitary mother in servitude. The first months, years even, are a blur in my mind before Watto, even as Anakin was an unbelievably easygoing baby. He must have sensed that I was struggling.”

“Can you repeat that?” Mace said, suddenly intense. “From our experience, children anywhere near my padawan’s Force sensitivity tend to be demanding infants before they arrive at the shielded environment of the Temple. They can’t control or shut out the constant influx of the Force. It distresses them. It’s usually one of the earliest signs for the parents that everything isn’t as it seems.”

Shmi shook her head. “No, he was...he was quiet. As content as a baby can be. Didn’t cry without avail.” The pause caused the tiniest stir in her shielding, like an imperceptible folding in a recently-ironed fabric. 

Qui-Gon exchanged a quick look with Mace. “Can I touch your hands? You seem to be in pain,” he asked gently. She offered them wordlessly. Qui-Gon clasped them in his larger ones, resolutely banishing the memory of the cherished hand he had held so tightly just days before.

Arthritis, the touch told him. He sent a healing wave through the swollen joints, causing Shmi to gasp softly. The easing of pain relaxed her shielding a faction, and the newly-emerged folding became more visible. 

“We are asking you to do something difficult,” he admitted. “Can you open your mind for me, for us? Along this particular part?” He ran his Force-sense as gently as possible on the surface on the seam. Shmi shivered and drew her hands away from his unresisting grip.

“I’m not sure how. It’s… I usually can’t afford to do that. None of the slaves can.” She cradled her hands against her chest, rubbing them.

“It might be something, or not. Just an innocent repressed memory, some old trauma. We all have those. It's just that it didn’t surface until we started talking about Anakin’s first moments in this Galaxy,” Mace said, visibly reining his presence in, trying not to sound too intimidating.

“The Dark Force users are the master manipulators of minds,” Qui-Gon said, feeling the stirs of anger. Somebody had touched the little family with malice when it had been in a vulnerable state, and was now forcing his hand even through the years, making him ask something he found objectionable in the first place. Shmi Skywalker was a civilian, a victim of the Republic turning a blind eye, in no way deserving such treatment. “A woman of your courage would have stood between them and your son, I’m sure. This is an intrusion, and I’m deeply sorry Shmi.”

“I assure you that we are doing this for Anakin. We have no desire whatsoever to seek control of you,” Mace reassured.

Shmi unbent her hands slowly, so slowly, fighting a deeply ingrained instinct. Qui-Gon waited passively, hands upturned on the table. Mace rose soundlessly and moved to Qui-Gon’s side, resting his hand on Qui-Gon’s shoulder, creating a transfer link by touch. 

When Shmi smiled like that, with hardness and defiance, she blazed just like her son. Her hands slotted onto Qui-Gon’s palms. 

It took his and Mace’s combined effort to pin the anomaly down, even when Shmi tried to open her mind to the best of her ability, not really knowing what she was doing. The anomaly avoided them like slithery synth-silk running through their fingers, flopping around them, creating obfuscating patterns, convincing them of its normalcy. Nothing to see here. Nothing broken, nothing stitched. Until. 

_The baby cried and cried. She didn’t know what to do, had no one to turn to in the middle of the wailing-pierced nights, during the days which blurred together._ **_Why_ ** _wouldn’t he stop crying? What was she doing wrong? By the little, malign spirits, what she didn’t realize?_

_In the memory, in her arms, the infant burned, a little nebula on his own, uncontrollable surges of power like tiny solar flares._

_The owners were starting to notice that something was amiss, and that always foretold trouble. The others had been understanding at the beginning, but the nights stretched, Anakin’s distress somehow spinning out minutes into what felt like hours. With the lack of sleep and privacy in their quarters shared by a dozen, Shmi’s tasks piling on their shoulders when Anakin didn’t suffer his mother out of his reach, their patience was wearing thin._

_She never thought she would find herself here. She wasn’t superstitious by her nature. She scoffed good-naturedly at the cook’s fortune telling and Matie’s bone spells. Yet, here she sat, by the dying embers of the open fireplace, waiting, for she had been alone in this world more than half of her life, and was at her wit’s end and, most importantly, this was all her money was worth. In her arms, Anakin followed the heavily aromatised smoke circling in the low ceiling with wide eyes, too exhausted at the moment to scream, only hiccupping every now and then._

_The house of witches._

_They would probably tell her that the restless desert spirits had chosen to taunt her child, or some other nonsense. The propitiation would cost all that was left of her coins._

_She waited for a long time before the heavy, bantha-leather flap was pushed aside._

Qui-Gon’s hold of the memory transfer almost slipped, and he felt Mace’s hand jerk. Shmi’s memory didn’t make sense to her, but, her being sensitive, the image still transferred.

_The hooded newcomer crackled disconcertingly. Even as the figure stood still, letting the flap fall down, they had an odd static disturbance in the Force, wavering like a Tatooine mirage. The Force pulled and plucked at the person, restless, no,_ **_attention seeking,_ ** _until it made a small gesture with their left hand._ The Jedi masters could hear the whisper. _“Easy. I need to be here now.”_ ****

_The Force yielded_ **_,_ ** _leaving space for the ordinary observations through senses_ **_._ **

_The figure’s cloak was so dark brown it seemed black in the near darkness of the large tent, the face hidden by a large hood. The person folded themselves carefully next to the frightened mother by the fireplace, resting their hands on their knees. Anakin sensed her mother’s distress, and began to wail angrily._ Humanoid looking hands, Qui-Gon noted hurriedly. Not very tall, but not prominently short either, taller than Shmi while sitting. Slender built. The hands looked like Tatooine, or the Galaxy at large, hadn’t treated their owner kindly; they were gaunt, the skin had patches of chloasma, nails cracked and split. An older being, older humanoid, perhaps an older man? 

_“Your baby is in pain?”_

The voice was rusty, deceptively kind. An old human male. 

_Shmi raised her chin and met the man’s eyes, which gleamed weakly from the hood’s shadow._ Yellow? Impossible to say.

_“Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t know what is wrong. Can you help him? He cries and cries and cries.”_

_“Show him to me.”_

_She had been cradling Anakin near to her chest, but now she reached out, suspiciously, ready to bolt at the first sight of threat. Anakin writhed in her hands between them, until man placed his own hands above the baby, not quite touching but hovering, his hands shaking a little so that the sleeves fell downwards and revealed bony wrists and the beginnings of Tusken tattoos. Anakin’s shout abruptly cut off, and the baby stared, open-mouthed._

The gesture looked like an offering, and Qui-Gon felt Mace suppressing a protective instinct. The same need to leap up and step between the baby and the old man coursed through him, regardless the dividing years. 

_“Little one, cease the fussing,” the man murmured. “You burn too hot, too bright. The Order is shrouded already, but the enemy knows. They sense you. They are always searching.”_

_“Don’t -” Shmi whispered._

_“Work with me, Anakin. Protect your mother,” the man commanded, the Force’s authority behind his voice, and the baby’s eyes flew open, ridiculously large. He raised his tiny fists and chased the man’s open palms with them, in vain._

_The man called out, and without warning, the Force rushed into the tent, roaring, causing the heavy flap to clap and waking the dying flames to a new life. An enormous gravitation field pushed inside, neither Light or Dark but an amalgamation, seething, creating a pressure that would have made their eardrums rupture, had they been exposed to it directly. The man knelt in the eye of the vortex, his being radiating Light so unyielding and severe that the unholy merger’s howling diminished against its will. Almost offhandedly, the man’s Light compelled it. The air tasted of iron and smoke. The man forged, and the fusion wailed and stormed and surrendered to him._

_It covered the baby from their sight,_ and Qui-Gon heard Shmi crying out from terror in the waking world. He tightened his hold, despising himself. 

_It was over as suddenly as it had started, like the man had grown tired of this charade. The fire faded to the embers again. The stars twinkled from the small opening; above the cold, calm desert night. Young Shmi’s face was empty and dazed. Her arms were hyperextended, clutching the baby with white, bloodless hands._

_The nebula of the boy was gone, veiled, the power surge directed safely out from the roof’s opening and up, to the stars, where it scattered soundlessly._

_“He is safe and resting,” the man rasped. He sat a bit slumped, the only sign of strain, his hood still impossibly in place. He gently guided Shmi’s hold of the baby to the ground, still not quite touching, and Anakin ended up resting on the thick, shaggy furs. “He is hidden from the malicious eyes, and I have put an… enchantment on him. When the Order comes, they will want him now. Your child is destined, Shmi. For that, I’m sorry, for there’s nothing I can do to prevent that.”_

_Anakin gurgled and reached again for the man. The man stared down at the baby for a few blinks of an eye, before he sighed and moved his hand in front of Shmi’s empty, slack face, a gesture intimately familiar to any Jedi working on the field and reduced to mind tricks in desperate times._

_“I’m sorry,” the man whispered again, and the particles of the memory unraveled like a torn suture._

***

They walked Shmi to her sleeping pallet, supporting her on both sides. This had been an inexcusable thing to do, below their status as Jedi, to expose an untrained this way. There were deep lines etched on Mace’s face, and Qui-Gon suspected he didn’t look much better. 

But Force, what they had found out…

“The house of witches,” Shmi muttered when they helped her to undress, eyes politely averted, and huddle under the blankets. 

“Yes, but it’s long in the past. It can’t hurt you or your son anymore. You should rest,” Mace murmured in a low voice, soothing. 

“You don’t understand,” Shmi said in a surprisingly steady voice and grasped Mace’s sleeve. “House of the _witches._ They don’t allow unsupervised males there. What he did was a sacrilege. Somebody might remember something.” 

The electric current in the Force told Qui-Gon that _yes,_ somebody just might. 

“I hope her liberation is enough to balance the damage,” Mace muttered a while later, when they stood on the balcony under the looming night sky. The sand storm was imminent. Around them, the slave quarters expanded to all cardinal points, a few remaining lights revealing the lateness of the hour. Qui-Gon fought a sense of déjà vu, half-expecting Obi-Wan’s voice on the other side of the comm, the tone advising caution and a healthy sense of doubt. What they had found was so enormous, so unheard of…

“That was an unkind thing to do,” Mace’s musings cut off Qui-Gon’s breathless train of thought. The Head of the Order was a tall, dark figure against the few flickering lights below.

“It revealed a solution,” Qui-Gon countered as quietly. 

“It revealed something, alright,” Mace admitted carefully. 

“You can’t be _serious,_ Mace! That was a true balance, guided by the Light! Somewhere out there in the Galaxy dwells a Force user, a _Light_ Force user so strong that he can create that! Can you even imagine what it means for Anakin?” Qui-Gon erupted, only remembering half-way through his speech to lower his voice to a furious hiss.

Mace was shaking his head in the darkness. “I’m not sure what we witnessed. That was foreign, and possibly dangerous. The Force, the Dark doesn’t… behave that way, submit that way.” 

“But it did, to him. Anakin needs him, more than anything! The Chosen one is supposed to learn that!“

Mace kept shaking his head, his Force presence uncompromising. “The Chosen one may someday need what he has to teach, Qui-Gon, but as of right now, my padawan most decidedly does _not._ ”

How they were still so blind? Couldn’t they see how all Anakin’s problems stemmed from that distinction, that dichotomy? How it was that he was the only one, again, who could see him as a whole, as he was meant to be? The unknown man clearly knew of it too. He had thought Mace was coming to terms with it, when he had come to Qui-Gon with his proposition at the Room of Thousand Fountains.

Anakin might not be his padawan officially, but Qui-Gon was the one who found him, compulsions or no, and was responsible for this. He would not let Anakin down, not after all he had put him through, after what he had already put _Obi-Wan_ through for the sake of this.

Obi-Wan.

_If they refuse to see this after everything, it leaves me no choice._

_I miss you. So much. Too much._

“How did Depa manage to wrangle money for this from the supervision committee?” he forced himself to ask, to calm down, to steer the conversation. 

“There’s a fund. It’s for the civilians whose lives are considered to be in grave danger because they possess some vital knowledge of the Dark, but the Order doesn’t have the resources to offer a full-time protection to them. It has been used so rarely in the last centuries that it’s been forgotten. Depa found out about it. Shmi Skywalker is about to be placed in a rehabilitation program if she so wishes. The procedure should quell the allegations of favoritism, and if not, our report of these findings surely cements the decision.” 

“It should drive home the utmost importance of this quest to the Council, true.”

“Enough!” Mace growled. “What we witnessed, Qui-Gon, was not of Jedi! We don’t know what it was! For all we know, it might be a trick of the Darkness!”

“I have never heard that the wielder of the Dark could pretend being Light like that,” Qui-Gon said.

“Neither have I. But I have never felt Light like that either.” Most unusually, frustration bled into and colored Mace’s voice. 

“That’s what I’m about to find out. You said it yourself. The Dark doesn’t submit like that. Except when the Chosen one is supposed to bring balance to the Force,” Qui-Gon said, putting his weight behind the words. A way out for the boy, a way to get rid of the looming darkness that looked for a way in, that had startled Obi-Wan in the beginning. The way to save this one, Chosen one. 

Mace gritted his teeth. “Your mission parametres haven’t changed, master Jinn. Observation and identification. Engaging is _not_ on the table!” 

“You already know my answer to that, Mace. I go where the Force wills me to go.” Old sorrows, old patterns, old frustrations; would the Council ever be able to let the change in, even the possibility of change, if it frightened them so? They would look the other way and hope that Anakin would grow up moderate and that the threat of the Sith was found to be exaggerated, so that they didn’t have to face this. So that Obi-Wan’s sacrifice would be for nothing. 

“Then I’ll remove you from this mission.”

“You have no right to do that, since I haven’t committed any violation. Go back to your padawan and let me find an answer for him.” He descended the steps, stopped at the foot of the stairs to listen to Shmi’s even breathing, and headed to the brewing night with purpose.

“You can’t even find an answer for your own padawan, Qui-Gon!” Mace called after him from the balcony, the sand storm gathering strength at the horizon behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

There were some things that never happened, and you didn’t question them: water doesn’t run uphill, the change is, paradoxically, the only constant in the universe, and when master Yoda wants to have tea with you, he invites you to his own quarters. He most definitely didn’t stand outside any Jedi’s humble residence and blink innocently up at you after tinkling the doorbell for the several minutes it took Obi-Wan to get himself out from the shower. 

Anakin stood next to the pneumatic front door and gaped nervously.

“Stand there all night and not invite me in, you are going to, hmmm? Look like trouts, hanging your mouth open like that, you do.”

Anakin hurried out of the way and bowed. “I apologize, master Yoda,” the boy mumbled to the floor. Obi-Wan ran his hand through his wet hair (growing out of shape, he noted, but the haircut hadn’t been very high on the priority list lately), and wrapped his bathrobe tighter around himself, also bowing deeply.

“Coming in late and unannounced I am, yes yes. No need for all that,” Yoda swung his stick to their general direction. He settled on the meditation cushion with small puffs and grunts.

“Anakin, see if master Qui-Gon has any yarba in his cabinet,” Obi-Wan suggested, and Anakin practically bolted to the kitchen.

“Uncomfortable around me, padawan Skywalker still is,” Yoda remarked, not unkindly, but not bothering to lower his voice either.

“He doesn’t have the memories of the creche lessons like the rest of us,” Obi-Wan observed while settling down, simultaneously aware of his heart, floundering like the aforementioned trout in his throat, _and_ being underdressed. Yoda wouldn’t be this… this much himself, if he was bringing the bad news. Would he?

In the kitchen, the teapot clanked on the stove more forcefully than strictly necessary. Obi-Wan felt a small stab of irritation. Self-centered. He reminded himself it was the case with all children - it was natural outside the Order, Anakin’s training yet too short to root out something so integral for surviving - and let the feeling dissipate. 

“Annoyed, you are?” Yoda’s ears rose.

“Just a reminder why there are very good reasons why a newly-knighted Jedi don’t take a padawan learner, master. I have enough work with myself as it is.”

Yoda looked pleased for some odd reason. “Good, good. Worked, master Windu’s dissolving the problem, clearly has.” Obi-Wan knew he looked nonplussed, for master Yoda crossed his hands on the top of the gimer stick, rested his chin upon them and hummed at him. _Young one, there’s no need to bother your head with that,_ the look told him. Smug little grandmaster troll.

“Good, it is, to know your own mind. Most unusual, the beginning your knighthood has been. Out there, you soon will be. Returning, master Windu is from Tatooine. Almost complete, your recovery is, the healers report to the Council.”

Anakin chose that exact, convenient moment to sail back in, a tray in his hands, presenting them a pot of yarba, three cups and some fire-ginger sweets for which he had persuaded Obi-Wan to accompany him to Merchant district. Junior padawans weren’t usually allowed outside the Temple unless in some official capacity, but what harm could it do? Anakin had been so excited. 

Yarba was a delicate and demanding tea to brew. Yoda didn’t bat an eye when he raised the cup on his lips. Obi-Wan was grateful. Anakin was clearly putting on his best show, small hands nimble, his movements economical and unobtrusive. 

“My grandmaster, did I hear correctly? Is my master coming back?” the boy queried politely, positioning himself slightly below Obi-Wan and Yoda on the floor. He blew his tea, eyes downcast. Yoda’s suddenly sharpening gaze penetrated the boy’s crown. Obi-Wan groaned inwardly. “Anakin.” 

“Padawan, of my lineage, you’re not. Well you know this about Jedi by now,” Yoda admonished.

Anakin raised his head and showed a toothy smile. “They - I mean, the other junior padawans - they speak very fondly of you. You are the oldest of the clan, aren’t you, master? And master Qui-Gon is my master too. Just a way to show respect where I come from.”

All of it was, technically, unorthodoxically,  and possessively, true. _ <What are you doing?> _ Obi-Wan sent through their temporary, rudimentary training bond with a considerable effort. <S _cribe play, > _ came the muffled and crackling answer. < _I_ _’m doing it your way. > _

Yoda harrumphed. “Word plays and flattery, your strong suit are not, padawan. Your talents, elsewhere they lie.”

“It’s not nice to speak behind other people’s back. I was being polite so that you wouldn’t feel the need to do that.”

“ _Anakin!”_

“Right you are, young one. Lowered my voice, I did not, did I?”

The Order’s oldest and the boy stared intently at each other. Obi-Wan wished he had a beard like master Mundi, so he could hide his face behind a stroking hand.

Anakin dropped his gaze first.

“I didn’t mean to be rude. I tried to play by the rules,” he muttered.

Yoda blinked slowly at the boy.

“A need for ego, Jedi have not, young Skywalker. Fragile things, egos, easy to interpret everything and everybody being about themselves. Watch everybody, I do, in this Order, behind their back. Ask me about your master, you can, without sweet talking.” 

Anakin looked affronted, and before Obi-Wan had time to send a warning in the Force, the little hothead was on it again. 

“It’s not sweet talking if you’re just trying to get people to like you! To see the real you!”

“All people, why should they like you, hmmm? Ego talking, this is.” 

Anakin imitated the fish again. Obi-Wan coughed discreetly and took a sip of foul liquid. Seven Siths, but the tea was ghastly.

“Speak plainly, you should continue doing, young Skywalker. Whether I like it, irrelevant, it is.”

Anakin visibly collected himself.

“Is master Mace coming back? Is everything alright with him?”

“Fruitful, told I was, their mission was.”

“If he’s coming back alone, I gather that the parameters of the mission are extended,” Obi-Wan sipped the tea carefully and nulled his palate with the Force. Yoda glanced at him from the corner of his eye.

“They are. Much more, we do yet not know.”

“Oh, so you can play, but I can’t? Master Obi-Wan wants to know if master Qui-Gon is coming back, or if they found something with my mom’s help and he’s continuing alone.” Anakin sounded vexed. Obi-Wan concentrated on putting his cup down without a clink. Yoda tilted his head.

“Soon to the Senate, master Windu must take his padawan. More impatient, the Chancellor grows day by day. Accompany you, I think I shall. Long time, it has been, since I had any fun in the Senate.”

“The Chancellor grows impatient?” Obi-Wan jumped after the change of topic.

“A special interest, claimed he has, for the Young Hero of Naboo,” Yoda explained slowly. “Denied his requests so far, master Windu has. Need time, young Skywalker did, to get to know our ways first.”

Anakin’s eyes were very round. “I didn’t know. Master Mace didn’t… and anyway, I didn’t even _do_ anything! It was the Force. Yi-ish, I hope he doesn’t call me that at master Mace’s face, that’s super awkward…” At Yoda’s raised eyebrow, Anakin covered his face and squeaked, face flushed, but his eyes were shining, reflecting his confused delight in the Force.

Obi-Wan understood. At the age of ten, if he had been called a Young Hero of Anything after such a daring adventure, he would have been embarrassed and pleased in equal measure. It would have probably gone into his head just the same way, even if Anakin was obviously trying to be a good Jedi padawan and give credit to the Force. Considering all this talk about egos, it was a lucky thing that Anakin’s master was one of the few beings in the Republic who actually had _any,_ though limited, leeway in dealing with the Chancellor. 

What in the name of Sith was the new Chancellor playing at? How did he even have _time_ to fanboy over a ten-year-old? He wasn’t a senator anymore, and although he probably wanted to maintain a good relationship with his home planet, a locally aimed publicity stunt like this seemed hardly necessary for somebody in his position.

Obi-Wan hadn’t paid attention to politics until very recently again, and senator Palpatine hadn’t left any lasting impression on him before… more dire events had wiped the man from his mind. He remembered the new Chancellor as somehow bland. Benevolent in a haughty, avuncular way. Politically savvy, and, in the light of the recent events, obviously not afraid to grab power.

Was he looking some leverage over Head of the Jedi Order by this? Mace Windu would not take that well. 

“What in the…” Anakin’s sputter woke him from his thoughts. “This is horrible!” The boy glowered at his teacup. Yoda raised his own cup to his lips, one long-clawed finger elegantly outstretched. The boy’s blush deepened to crimson. “I mean, it obviously requires an acquired taste. Master Yoda.”

“Accompanying you and master Windu to the Senate, surely I am,” Yoda declared pensively.

The rest of the tea time passed either in an amused or mortified silence, depending on whom you asked.

“At the end, your long wait is, knight Kenobi. A mission, the Council has for you,” master Yoda announced after Anakin was banging around in the kitchen again.

_You knew the chances were slim._

“Yes, master Yoda,” he answered dutifully. 

“Coming back, Qui-Gon is not. Listening to the will of the Force, he is once again, he says. Definitely listening to something he is _,_ yes _._ After the prophecy, he is hunting once more. Hmph.” Yoda had always been notoriously difficult to read; that he was making his displeasure so clearly seen, and _felt,_ startled Obi-Wan into alertness.

No word for him. No explanation.

Nobody owned one to the green knight who had nothing to do with the secret reconnaissance mission whatsoever. Sending it might be too risky anyway. 

“Both of you, drowned you were,” Yoda said. 

Obi-Wan blinked. “I’m sorry master, I got lost in my thoughts. What are your referring to?”

“On the flight back from Naboo, in the bacta tank. Together you were, before they determined they did that helped you, it did not. In the redness, floated you, twining, silenced. In front of the tank, I sat. Thinking, the end of my lineage in front of me is. Knew nothing of the reason, we did, at that time. Only sit I could, and watch. Accept.”

Despite the lateness of the hour, Yoda’s eyes were open, piercing in a way he rarely allowed. 

“This Trial of yours, map it is to the many different paths.” 

“Did you have a vision, grandmaster?” Obi-Wan asked, forcing his voice past the sudden lump in his throat. 

Yoda shook his head. “Too many open pathways. Too many catastrophes. The one making decision, cannot be me. Choose, Qui-Gon must. Splinters and circles, I see. Reconstruction, is asked of you. Prepare, you must. Gain strength. Gain your footing. Gain balance. Contemplate the fire in you. Nurture it, truly you should? Healing, a fire cannot be.”

Obi-Wan was already inclining his head when a small, stubborn voice whispered: _No hiding. Not anymore. Not in this._

“I won’t quench it unless it’s the will of the Force,” he confessed softly, head held high. 

“It’s beautiful. I want something similar someday,” came from the kitchen doorway. Anakin stood there, feeling bristingly protective in the Force.

“Anakin, please.” Unquenchable or not, he wasn’t demonstrating a behaviour worthy of a caretaker of an impressionable young padawan. Untamed, unbalanced fires were destructive. 

Yoda rose from the cushion, leaning heavily on his cane. He opened his mouth, but the first time in his life, Obi-Wan saw Yoda swallowing his words, shaking his head. The white tufts of hair on the back of Yoda’s head stood more prominent than usual, underlining his age as he hobbled on his way. 

***

Anakin crawled next to Obi-Wan on the couch that night. He knew he should guide the boy through self-calming meditations and send him back to his own bed. 

He rolled to his side and extended his arm soundlessly. Anakin snuggled closer and wiggled against Obi-Wan’s chest until he found a comfortable spot. 

“I’m trying,” Anakin breathed, such a profound tiredness that Obi-Wan’s throat constricted from recognition. 

Damn his grandmaster’s maxims to hells.

Sometimes, trying was _everything._

***

He experienced his last vision of the past-that-didn’t-come-to-pass that night, cramped between the back of the couch and the drooling ten-year-old.

_They were coming back from the Senate district. Anakin sat as far as possible from him on the backseat of a hovertaxi. He looked to be around twelve. His hair, once stick straight, had started to darken, and curl around his ears. His braid touched his collarbone. He stared out at the busy evening, arms crossed, fuming silently._

_Obi-Wan in the taxi inhaled, exhaled, inhaled. “Anakin.”_

He had a beard. A kriffing beard.

_“Master.” Sullen._

_“Explain yourself, padawan.”_

Padawan. Was it possible to get seasick in a dream? 

_“She_ **_touched_ ** _me!” the boy snarled._

_“She ruffled your hair, and you_ **_bit_ ** _her!”_

_Anakin gnawed his lower lip and stared petulantly at the passing holoads and light shows._

_“Anakin, you very nearly caused a major diplomatic incident. The negotiations with the Suurruur delegation have been stuck for weeks. We have been working very hard to get to this point. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”_

_“You should have heard the things she whispered to me!” the pre-teen very nearly yelled. “Biting was too kind to her! She shouldn’t be near anyone she considers a servant! We should protect people from her kind, not grant her diplomatic immunity!”_

_“It’s our duty to ensure that in a way that doesn’t cause more suffering, unlike your actions have done tonight. It’s our duty as Jedi to weigh our behavior against the larger picture_ **_and_ ** _the well-being of all sentients.” The hovertaxi Obi-Wan looked like he very much wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose._

_“None of you were going to bantha shit before the negotiations were over. You don’t know how much damage people like her can cause!” Anakin argued hotly._

_“You don’t know that.”_

_“Well, would you? Have taken action? Even if it came before your precious duty?”_

Bearded Obi-Wan crossed his arms too, looking stricken, but somehow, somehow, it didn’t transfer to the boy. What kind of bond did they have? Didn’t Anakin really trust him to act on something like this?

The boy at least seemed to hear his questioning, because _Anakin rested his forehead against the car window and muttered, “Sorry, master, sorry. I’m sorry. Of course you would have. You would have found a way as always. That was a horrible thing to say. I ask your forgiveness.”_

_The vision Obi-Wan released a deep sigh. “It’s not wrong that your heart goes out to those in need of protection, padawan. But you let it rule over your head, and your tongue, far too often.”_

_“Master Qui-Gon says justice is heart’s best shield.”_

_Obi-Wan could see from parsecs away how his counterpart closed himself off, falling into a terrible calm, like in the eve of a deadly battle._

_“That’s enough. We have been over this.”_

_“But - “_

_“No buts. No ifs. We have been over this. Master Yoda has explained this to you, repeatedly. You don’t get to use his name like this, padawan, to shift the blame.”_

_Anakin stopped the hovertaxi with an angry jolt of the lever. The car nosedived towards the nearest free parking spot, generating a trail of angry honking behind them._

_“You want his memory all by yourself, and you don’t share. Master.”_

_“Don’t you dare to step out of this car, padawan.”_

The scene faded, like running watercolor drawing after a splash of water, the battle of wills in a forever stalemate.

_***_

Pounding little fists on his chest woke him. “Master Obi-Wan! Master Obi-Wan!”

Sweat dampened Anakin’s forehead and hair. Obi-Wan realized he had been clasping the small body in an iron grip and, with a gasp of terror, shoved the boy away from him. Anakin landed on the floor on his butt with a thud.

“You hurt,” the boy whispered. “I… I chose not to see it. I thought I heard him.” His eyes were huge and bottomless in the dark.

Involuntary sharing. With a kriffing ten-year-old. He had only caused anything like this years ago, in the first throes of his prescience, and the knight who got sucked in was of species with strong empathy tendencies. Could the physical nearness be the reason? 

The dream suggested something else, something powerful and askew between them. 

“Come here,” Obi-Wan rasped. 

“I chose not to see,” Anakin kept slurring against his chest. 

“I didn’t understand either,” he answered, the repeating helpless. “I didn’t understand either.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> antheia sorted out my esl messes. Any remaining oddities are my own.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we live up to the tree farm tag.
> 
> Thank you so much antheiasilva for beta-reading, and thoughtful and useful suggestions!
> 
> Content warning: brief, passing mention of kidnapping a minor.

**Absence: an act in four parts**

**(Prelude)**

His padawan stood waiting at the very end of the landing platform, well behind the delegate that always formed around Mace nowadays; his movements were public and belonged to the Republic. He allowed himself one deep sigh. 

Mace noticed how knight Kenobi positioned himself behind the boy, one hand on Anakin’s shoulder, a gesture of reassurance. He almost sighed again. His padawan’s ability to make these connections in such a short time was as remarkable as it was frustrating. This one shone strong and bright, if oddly unacknowledged by both participants. 

He felt Anakin’s excitement along the training bond like a small, churning spring, and through it, Kenobi’s gentle rebuke and the boy mentally sticking out his tongue to him, but obeying nonetheless. He greeted the delegation, but his heart wasn’t in it. His mind decided now was the proper time to raise a memory of eleven-year-old Depa, gangly limbs and unbound, unruly hair, gazing up at him. She had understood everything from his slight smile, from their mirroring bows, and her laughter had sprinkled into the Force and made his days lighter.

This was a greeting of formal capacity, like everything he did in his role outside the Temple’s walls. Surely Kenobi had warned the boy, and his padawan seemed to understand. The paparazzi droids were always on the prowl. The Senate’s different factions, and especially the new Chancellor’s faction, had bought more or less loyal eyes and ears among every crowd such as these. He had received Yoda’s increasingly irritated messages on his way back from Vargos II. “Tired, I am, of playing middleman between the heartsick Chancellor and master Windu,” the grandmaster declared.

So, Chancellor Palpatine wanted to exploit this connection he had to Mace’s padawan. 

Shmi Skywalker was right. It was time for a straightforwardness, for taking a stance. It was time to act according to the master’s duties; nobody said it couldn’t also be a joy. The boy belonged with the Jedi now. **Not** to the Dark, not to the shatterpoints, as Mace himself had feared, not to politics, **not** to some unfamiliar, threatening powers outside of the Order’s knowledge. 

They would have to go through him first. 

Mace Windu made his excuses and marched directly to the discreet pair. He inclined his head to Kenobi who took a polite step back and bowed.

When he opened his arms and embraced his confused, but immensely delighted padawan, he could sense the same shock that colored Kenobi’s face rippling around the landing platform, through all the present members of the Order. Mace appreciated that the young knight’s expression turned from shocked to approving in a matter of seconds.

In his arms, Anakin glowed, and buried his face to Mace’s robes, embarrassed of his reaction at the same time. The training bond echoed disbelief and wonder. The boy had repelled the possibility of separation with all his considerable power his whole life, clinging into and sheltering her mother. 

He had left Shmi Skywalker at the rehabilitation center on Vargos II with an open fate and a brand-new, terrifying freedom. It was, he thought, one of the most dangerous and most right things he had ever done in his life.

Depa would be pleased to hear her machinations had beared fruit.

“Mom?” Anakin whispered, and Mace had not planned to tell him right away - his padawan was too young and way too prone to public outbursts - but somehow, the child caught the wind of that breathtaking thing which was _freedom_ through their bond, even if he didn’t know any specifics. It was enough.

“Outwards, Anakin, upwards, like we practised!” Kenobi had time to exclaim, before the Force-burst strong enough to knock them all off their feet erupted from the boy, relief and anger and fear and throat-choking attachment. Anakin Skywalker, letting his feelings truly go into the Force, was like a shock wave, and Mace could only hold his padawan through the spasms. Thank the stars Kenobi was quick on his feet, already sheltering them in Force from the prying eyes.

Damn Qui-Gon Jinn to the iron pits of Truelle. How he could simultaneously be so blind and so well-versed in their padawan’s needs, Mace never understood. 

Knight Kenobi. Bright, young, clever. Standing before him like he stood before the Council not so long ago, describing something Mace now realized was not an isolated occurrence, but an overture. 

A Force user, commanding vergence. Just like Kenobi; his amalgamation an outcome of desperation and attachment. Except, somehow it didn’t burn the mysterious figure to the ashes, unlike what had almost happened to Kenobi. 

Qui-Gon Jinn’s comm was silent and out of reach, and Mace, fumbling as he eased his trembling padawan at the same time, stared at it, head full of misgivings. 

**I**

The first mission was a moral quagmire. 

The labour minorities on Jukol asteroid belt had requested protection from the Senate; the relationship between the native mining cartel and the workers had reached its snapping point. The workers had suffered xenophobic attacks against different communities during the last four standard months. As a response, the varmigio miners threatened a strike.

The Senate moved quickly when their interstellar traveling was at risk; shipyards from Corellia to Fondor depended on the mineral transportation from Jukol.

It was a high-profile mediation mission. It wouldn’t have fallen on Obi-Wan’s shoulders if not for the fact that he and Qui-Gon had visited the system several times in the year of Obi-Wan’s twentieth nameday. The native cartel had been expanding aggressively, recruiting star systems wide, especially among the refugee settlements. The Jedi had been sent to overlook the legality and ensure the safe colonization.

He remembered Qui-Gon from the earlier mission; an endless queue of cantinas they have visited, traveling from the clan council to clan council, inspecting the workers’ living conditions and listening to their complaints and suggestions and mediating them to the cartel. Most of the miners believed meetings should happen over dinner and heavy drinking, for there was little other amusement on the market on the asteroid belt. His master had thrived; so many intertwining destinies and stories. Obi-Wan remembered him surrounded by the mixed and hopeful folk at the dawn of their new lives, laughing uproariously at something, his Force presence a warm and heavy grasp on Obi-Wan’s shoulders, solid if a little tipsy.

Nothing was further from the present day’s reality on Jukol.

Some of the mining groups, Obi-Wan found out, reacted to the attacks by retreating to the ethical purity and dreaming of the glorious, and totally fabricated, past. The development made the groups eye both each other and the Jedi suspiciously, their union dysfunctional, while their relationship to the cartel grew taut. 

Then, a gang of late-comers with seedy pasts got into an argument with the local cartel representative on X3-orbit, and as revenge, kidnapped her son. The native public was up in arms, demanding a swift revenge and even swifter expulsion of the whole communities sharing the same species as the perpetrators. They had no place to return to, as Jukol was now their home.

His instincts and the Force revealed the only feasible solution. The Council agreed, and seemed somewhat surprised that Obi-Wan had bothered to contact them before executing the plan ( _T_ _hanks, master,_ Obi-Wan thought dryly, schooling his features.) The attackers should be judged by the Republic interstellar judicial system. The local authorities were compromised. They felt the pressure of the public outrage, and were equally afraid of strikes, which would in turn affect their contracts with the shipyards. The mining communities didn’t trust the trial to be fair, and the extremist groups were already spinning out tales of martyrdom. The Jedi scapegoat, in disguise of the Republic intervention, was starssent for both the local administrative and the clan councils. 

The public definitely didn’t see it. The Jedi was either protecting the criminals, or participating in a conspiracy. 

High-stake missions with Qui-Gon had escalated often enough that the running for their dear lives was something Obi-Wan became, not accustomed to, but prepared for by the tender age of sixteen. But this kind of mission, ending with an angry mob closing in, rotten vegetables flying alongside the yells of “Jedi scum!” and much worse, had been few and far between. 

He knew he looked every bit of a grim-faced, heartless stereotype of a Jedi the rumours and prejudice painted.

Obi-Wan smiled thinly, and accepted. If the outwardly acted mutual disgust for the meddling central government and its representative was what it took to get the parties around the same table, he took the blame.

The clan elders had actually took his hand and thanked him gravelly, understanding shining on their faces, just before he took a deep breath and braced himself for conveying the prisoner transport to the off-planet ship. A master-padawan pair had arrived, to continue the inspection of the newly-organised negotiations from the shadows in case things started to spiral out of control again.

The mission was a moral quagmire, and unfinished on the top of that. 

The return flight was uneventful. The prisoners were divided into separate cells in the cargo hold. 

Peace danced out of Obi-Wan’s reach. The effect of being exposed to the overwhelming feelings of the enraged mob was harder to shake off than usual. It didn’t help that every time he visited the cargo holds, the putrid miasma of hatred and self-denial, which emanated from the cells, made him instinctively reach for his saber.

The evidence and testimonies were unambiguous, he had inspected them himself.

The case would be buried under the exhausting bureaucratic machinery that was the Republic’s juridical system for an indeterminable time.

It was disconcerting, in comparison, how his master’s impact, how _any_ Jedi’s impact for the system could deteriorate in a few short years.

Qui-Gon would shrug, would take the knowledge of his eventual failing on his shoulders as always, and would smile his flashing half-smile. _T_ _he only constant is change, padawan._

He hadn’t allowed the stab of longing, not once, during the mission. It hit him with vengeance as he knelt in front of the window of the streaked hyperdrive space, nursing a headache and an oxygen deficit from the artificial atmospheres of the belts. 

He fought a want to withdraw, to not deal with this, and the old habits died so hard, kicking and screaming all the way, but he had blasted his hiding place open himself. 

He closed his eyes against the onslaught, doubled over. 

He had kissed the corner of that half-smile, for one night. He had ---. And then Qui-Gon had ---. He clenched around the memory, around the dull ache that was the stump of their severed bond, before he gave it up, to the warping emptiness outside. Trial; a fire to be tamed, to make it a shelter, a tool of defence instead of destruction. 

**( I )**

The house of witches was no house, but a mobile tent village, months gone from the outskirts of Mos Espa by the time Qui-Gon determined from the locals where the caravan had resided. 

“Oh, they are in Mos Eisley now,” grumbled the sleepy owner of the pawnshop while opening her awnings. “No way, ser, they were on their way to Mos Taike,” countered the greengrocer, his supply already wizened in the oppressive heat, despite the ungodly early hour. “It’s not true, they were caught in a sandstrom halfway to Freetown and they all died horrible deaths,” a pack of children informed him, running away in the next instant, dirty soles winking from the sandals and the shrill peal of laughter ringing in the air in their wake.

Gone. Not-here. That’s where his meditation centered, once he found the spot secure enough, renting a room by the hour upstairs from the nearest, open-around-the-clock cantina, setting the mental alarms to the door and falling ungraciously on his knees. The Force was indifferent to his wishes. He wondered if the dusty patches on his leggings were permanent by now. 

Tame the yearning for someone not here. He was more seasoned than this. He knew better. He wouldn't cast a shadow. He would not let Obi-Wan's sacrifice, their separation be for nothing. The solution was here somewhere, he could taste it in Force. 

_Tell me where I should go._

The Force pointed.

And he knew it was his heart doing the pointing.

_No. Tell me where I should be._

The Force told him.

And he knew it was his want doing the telling.

_No! Tell me where are they._

_Well, if you ask like that,_ the Force seemed to pout, and showed him wastelands and and showed him a quest.

He rose, armpits and scalp stinging unceasingly from the sand since the storm last night, absent-mindedly rubbing his chest where the withered, severed bond also stung.

He paid the owner for the room, and started asking the way to the caravanserai of Mos Espa. There were limits on how long a journey he was willing to try alone with the speeder in such a hostile environment. According to Obi-Wan, the long desert planet missions never suited his mood; they made him grumpy and brusque. He suspected the following days, in the company of eopies and the twin suns, neither of which knew how to tone it down, would to nothing to change that. 

***

**II**

The second mission left him tired to his bones.

Haermaenie was uninfluential and peaceful planet in the outermost edges of the Mid Rim, and its population had always been quite satisfied to be left alone. That is, until a pirate ship crashed on the surface, the crew either already dead or in the various stages of dying. 

The plague broke loose.

The Rotting, they called it.

Haermaenie was an agricultural planet, one crumb in the Mid Rim’s vast breadbasket. The politics had always been put to a back seat when the harvesting season came. And then the spring sowings came. And then there was an outbreak of fungal disease in the apple orchards. In conclusion, the people of Haermaenie were hard working, upright folk who stood honest and proud like old red pine woods. They didn’t have time for the coquetting and fraternizing of the Core. 

So when the plague came, they were, not friendless - the Republic had _standards,_ after all - , but quite isolated. The quarantine around the planet was established swiftly. On the contrary, the emergency supplies and the medical remedies took their sweet time, the four-person Jedi team soon found out after trespassing the quarantine and landing in the all-but-deserted capital city. 

(Obi-Wan knew the Council had had to fight tooth and nail to send a team in the first place, the Chancellor debating that the Jedi were sorely needed elsewhere. Which wasn’t wrong. After Yinchorr, it seemed they were never enough, like Galaxy’s appetite for suffering and mayhem had been awoken from hibernation.)

It soon became obvious that the aid shipments might look good on paper, but severely underestimated the need and chaos on planetside. No report they sent made any difference. 

Four ratios, four medications, four protective gears were nothing, in the grand scheme of things. None of them hesitated to give them up the minute the situation dawned on them, leaving only doses of antibiotics as an emergency pack. They had other means of protection. Haermaens did not.

Obi-Wan had learned to cleanse alcohol and its effects the same year he turned legal on the most Core and Rim worlds. This was on the whole another level.

The Rotting’s progress was crawling during the first forty eight hours after the contamination, always attacking the lungs first. The Jedi had time to detect and purge the virus from their systems, and the Dressellian master in their group seemed almost immune to it in the begin with. 

They took turns, watching over each other’s healing trances. Obi-Wan began to detest sleeping, which was like meeting an old, unpleasant acquaintance. In sleep, the disease crept over him and into him, making the hair in his arms to stand up.

Haermaens had deserted the capital in a panicked rush after the initial outbreak. The small groups of medics, Jedi as their escorts, traveled across the central parishes from one forming refugee camp to another, from village to village, having to turn back every now and then from the country roads when blasters were aimed at them. In camps and villages, they ensured that the queueing and the distribution happened in an orderly manner and nobody tried to take advance or intimidate others.

The crop rotted in the fields and orchards, the smell persistent and sickeningly sweet, foretelling losses and a harsh winter cycle. 

It covered other smells.

The muted suffering settled over the land alongside the thick autumn mists.

Haermaens’ vocal chords weren't fit for screaming. 

It took days for Obi-Wan to notice the same silence extending to their little group. They were often split across the countryside, and the constant cycle of purging and healing on the cellular level plowed deep furrows on everyone’s faces. 

They trusted him to handle the situation in the temporary medic camps, and safeguard their backs, and let Obi-Wan know this, although he was by far the youngest of the group. But the ring of silence descended gently upon him on those rare occasions that they all gathered at the same place (mostly it was the hastily erected headquarters on the outskirts of the second biggest city, where Dresselian master Armut Toom coordinated the outgoing units and the distribution of the arriving supplies.) 

One of the other knights, Mirialan, was a puritan when it came to the Code, he learned long after the mission was concluded. The other human knight, a few years older than him, was withdrawn by her nature, and it took time for Obi-Wan to recognize that the knight thought it was _he_ who, in her opinion, needed the space and quiet. Master Toom eyed him suspiciously, which Obi-Wan thought was due to assumed wetness behind his ears; the master _did_ ease after he became assured of Obi-Wan’s competence.

It only became evident from some offhand remark in the last days of the doleful mission - they were all slipping from exhaustion when not on the field, even the master - that master Toom had doubted his abilities because of the Trial he was under. 

He had wondered if Obi-Wan was able to put his duty above his attachments.

Sometimes, the smallest things, the overheard things showed the way. He settled, he breathed, he drifted, his physical tiredness actually acting for his advance, easing the falling into Force’s convolutions, which was a profound relief.

In Obi-Wan’s meditation, the question rouse: _why_ was he able to perform his duty from his core, when all the teachings told him he would become compromised and unreliable?

His duty _was_ the act of his love, not only of his belief, his meditation told him after hours of soul-searching. It had forged into that shape for years. Performing his duty expressed his soul-rooting trust in the Force, the faith he had for his sometimes frustrating Order.

It also represented his love to the man who had taught him all about the duty in the first place, his example at times unreachable, at times bordering heretic, always leaving Obi-Wan the space to decide himself.

The sheer audacity of him naming this. Like you approached some wild creature sideways, slowly, slowly, and it didn’t have time to be surprised when you were already touching its twitching flank, claiming it. _Love._ Even in his private meditations, it was rejoicing and vertiginous, like falling into the sky. 

Fulfilling his duty from all his core was his constant love letter to Qui-Gon Jinn, far more fundamentally than any wobbling words he managed to put on a hololetter.

Shared duty, shared Trial.

The long mission on Haermaenie left him harrowingly tired, and at peace with his unvoiced truths.

The Force played no favorites, gave no worldly prizes for your obedience, your listening and giving yourself up for its use. Still, it was a heady feeling when, rarely, the Galaxy seemed to notice your struggling, and sent a small gift on your way. Such a gift sat on his comm account the day their contact announced the Republic was finally able to disengage more Emergency Response troops, and the possible return to the Temple shimmered faintly in some distant future.

_Obi-Wan,_

_I’m on the trail. If it’s a fool’s errand or a pilgrimage, I cannot yet say. I ask for your patience and trust, one more time._

_I thought I was at least halfway there, before you, before this. I knew nothing. Turns out I don’t know the name of any road._

_Do you know how painful a realization that is for a master, in front of his padawan?_

_And yet, the thoughts of you fill me with joy, in the midst of the journey, and far beyond._

Shared joy.

A respite from the muted sorrow and sickness around him.

He wasn’t surprised the slightest when it turned out to be the only and last letter for weeks and weeks to come. When his master found purpose _,_ he was nearly unstoppable.

**( II )**

“You’re looking for a dead man. That’s why they don’t remember. Nobody wants to remember death.”

A crone, her face eaten by spice and the suns. One of the many beggars and street dwellers trailing after the large tent village of witches. 

Like him. One of the beggars, after answers, after knowledge. 

The spaces like this, of magic and old wives’ tales, always made his sense of the Force jumpy, not because something inexplicable was happening, but because people’s beliefs and convictions bled outwards.

She sat on the blistering ground, heedless of the blaring suns and bantha dung, across from where he rested his back on the brick-and-mortar wall in the midday’s feeble shadow. It was as far as males were allowed in the camp. 

They were outside Mos Eisley, in the end. The caravan had been more than happy to accept a ridiculously cheap mercenary; the stench of a twelve-day eopie company had become a part of his own body odour. ( _How inconvenient for someone who now wants share himself with the tidiest - no. No! Concentrate on the trail, or you will inevitably get lost, never finding the end of this quest._ )

_Never finding your way back to him._

Had those two always been inextricable?

That was overly dramatic and slightly ridiculous. He had clearly spent too much time in the suns. 

His overcompensating body didn’t know how to act in these sweltering circumstances for days and days; he had to rely on the Force multiple times to prevent a heat stroke, and the symptoms still sneaked insidiously upon him. The skin on his face and hands peeled off, flakes of dead white on top of angry, irritated red, no matter how generously he added the salve from his utility belt.

Obi-Wan, freckles and copper and cream, would scorch into something wild and tender to the touch here. 

“I beg your pardon?” he uttered, his voice scorched too. He dreamed of green waters and rivers all night, sharing his dreams with the whole kriffing planet.

“I have been watching you. You go round and round, asking for a dead man. Nobody remembers him, but I do. I have only seen him once, mind you. Not easy to catch.”

Nobody had displayed any surprise at his questioning, which had struck him as peculiar at first. Soon though he realized that the tent village attracted the misfits, odd souls, crazed, shocked and seekers all over the planet, even on such a remote place as Tatooine. His questions were far from the most eccentric. He fit right in. He and the old woman eaten by spice.

“Why do you think he is dead, grandmother?”

“No one’s mother! No one’s mother!” she shrieked to him, suddenly surging forward and trying to claw his face. 

“All right, easy.” He grabbed the wrists as gently as possible, protecting his eyes from the filthy, long nails. She calmed as quickly as she flew into a temper, recognizing the greater physical power and the possibility of getting hurt.

“Why do you think he is dead, the one I’m looking for?”

“Isn’t it death, to be the one who nobody knows, nobody remembers?” the crone cackled. “Oh, but there is more. Death walks with him, in him. He brings it within him anywhere he goes.”

Death. No memory. No a sense of self, but a scarecrow, a facade, a hoax. How that was of Light? How could it be?

What he was doing here?

“How come you remember him, then?” he growled. 

The old woman shrunk into herself. “Because he was kind,” she said, her creaking voice almost disappearing under the haggling that broke out at the nearby pot maker’s stall. “I saw something I should not, and he was going to take it away from me, but I asked, take everything else instead, everything that bites and stabs and bites and stabs. He did. It doesn’t matter that I know, because he took it away, and the people know. So they don’t really see me, really don’t listen to me. Who would I tell?”

“Do you,” and he had to swallow in the middle, his throat parched, the Force teeter-tottering between the paths and possibilities, making him want to cough and hiccup, because what _kindness_ was like this, what Light, “do you know where I can find him?”

She frowned at him, pulled her hands free and actually tutted at him. “Already asking the wrong questions. _When_ you can find him, because death’s schedule is his own, no exceptions to us mere mortals. But they do know about the dead man, those desert-dwellers. They tell stories of him by the campfire, in the wastelands. Maybe you should ask them. Deluded though, you must tolerate them; they think him a harbinger of sickness and desert crazy. Pfft, I say. Kind, he is. How could he not be, with the company he keeps?”

She was desert crazy herself, must be; but the Force disagreed strongly, more strongly that he had felt in days. He looked deeper, careful not to touch anything, behind the addiction and the disorder that was her honeycombed memories. A small place to retreat, consoling; a slightly Force sensitive individual, with her innermost shields reinforced against the madness which once swallowed her whole. Was it his gift, the kindness of a dead man?

The Force buckled and refused any other options but its will. He had always known what it meant to him.

“How can I thank you?”

She looked at him with pity, one beggar to another. 

**III**

Obi-Wan Kenobi’s third mission was an indisputable success, in Anakin’s opinion.

“Yet another leader who cares more about the honor of his people than his people’s wellbeing. I have always found those delightful,” the young knight muttered to himself, skimming his datapad on their flight back to Coruscant. Obi-Wan appeared surprised for a short moment as Anakin burst into giggles, as if he’d forgotten that he had company in the cabin. 

He smiled back at him sadly, something only adults managed.

If Anakin had thought before that being a Jedi knight was something dashing, his first mission with Obi-Wan cleared him from such misbeliefs. He suspected master Mace had chosen this particular mission as his first - tightly duty-bound to Coruscant as his master was once again - precisely because it was so mind-bogglingly boring and _safe_. 

Despite the idleness of the mission, Anakin suspected that his master had also wanted to show him a true Jedi knight in action. Obi-Wan Kenobi was something of a marvel to watch, even on the endlessly long negotiation table with the ceremoniously, pompously dressed adults with serious faces and the dismissing attitude towards Anakin from the start. He had bristled, first; then Obi-Wan had let him know which members of the different factions Anakin was meant to observe and report back to him. Anakin had thrown himself to the task, reporting in front of the young knight every evening, hands clasped behind his back and a pucker of concentration between his brows. Obi-Wan listened to him with quiet attentiveness, ceasing his all other tasks for the moment. 

He hadn’t understood at first what this had to do with being a Jedi, or saving people, fighting injustice, or even with the Force itself. Obi-Wan didn’t even seem to _do_ that much; he listened, he herded the conversation when negotiations threatened to steer too far away from the present day, he offered modest suggestions and mild proposals every now and then. Anakin would have lost his patience like a month ago, and would have just _told_ people what to do. 

“It isn’t about doing,” Obi-Wan told him one evening. “It’s about listening. You position yourself to the Force, open up to it, snoop around a bit, listen and embrace. The Light Force knows what you want to achieve, under its service. It shows you the path. It’s not always the path you expect, but Jedi’s trust on the Force is unlimited. Only after, you act.”

Obi-Wan was in control of the whole negotiations but nobody _realized_ , and therefore didn’t feel pressured or threatened, Anakin understood after that. Even when the tiny, kind of pathetic extremist group tried to intervene, he had seemed to sense it beforehand. The whole situation was over long before Anakin properly realized what was going on. Obi-Wan’s defence was like looking straight into the twin suns, the violence elegant, poised.

The serenity with which he returned to the negotiation table, assuring the worried, quacking politicians, not a hair out of its place, impressed the squabbling factions as much as Anakin, and discussions sped up after that. This was what master Mace had wanted to show him, surely; a perfect Jedi.

So far out of Anakin’s reach it made him despair, until Obi-Wan cocked a sarcastic eyebrow at him and he felt very young, and very foolish.

And yet, he remembered the dream. The vision. Whatever. Something was different. Obi-Wan did retreat every night to his ablutions and meditations, the Force around him almost visibly simmering with his emotional release. Obi-Wan never seemed bothered about it, how he gave his feelings and concerns to the Force (something Anakin just didn’t seemed to grasp _,_ no matter how hard he tried; the release, when it deigned to arrive, frightened him by its intensity). He didn’t hide it from Anakin, his need to do so, like he had done in the strange dream. He was dutiful and serious, but there was a glint of mischief in his eyes every now and then, as he whispered some amusing detail to Anakin’s ear, and Anakin had to stifle a giggle. 

He held himself apart, but not aloof. 

Anakin had seen him sorting out laundry, grumbling how the maintenance didn’t know after twelve kriffing years that his master was three kriffing robe sizes bigger than him, for crying out loud. He was older, and Jedi, and annoyingly superior and calm all the time, and didn’t know how to ask things. Anakin wanted him to be... _pleased_ with Anakin, not like he wanted his master and master Qui-Gon to be pleased with him, with fervor and strive and struggle, but as someone who he looked up to and admired, who he bantered with and who irritated him in equal measure.

He didn’t have a word for that kind of person in his life.

On their flight back, Obi-Wan wrote a report and said in that posh, quiet voice of his how Anakin had done well, and then he smiled sadly afterwards, like he had forgotten that there was someone with him, and that the one was _Anakin._ Anakin thought how every single adult was sometimes so stupid, in all their wisdom and knowledge. 

**( III )**

How do you walk into the wastelands?

You didn’t. It was foolhardy. You didn’t enter there alone, if you weren’t a tenderfoot who wanted to get himself killed. 

The southern wastelands were the wilderness of sparse population, sparser places of shelter and the sparsest of kindness. They swallowed beings alive, obliterated them and buried them in sand, rocks and hill mazes. 

The Force’s pull was insistent and consistent, something he hadn’t felt in a long time, not since he had laid his eyes on Anakin. It surpassed the doubt, the deadly heat, the feverish, sweaty night's rest.

It surpassed almost everything. Almost. 

Copper and cream and the green waters of his dreams.

The young eopie he had bargained for, pack stocked full, nipped the back of his poncho. He had stood in the fringes of town too long, his thoughts miles away, rubbing his chest, wasting the precious moments of the morning cool. He raised his scarf against the flying sand and ducked his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on tumblr under the same pseudonym, crying over the bearded, tragic, extremely competent Jedi, come say hi! :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> antheiasilva, thank you for your keen eyes and your steady hand, despite feeling so ill. 
> 
> I, uh, hope this evokes feelings.

_\--- but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision._

_-_ W.G. Sebald, _Austerlitz_

**The final**

“You’re late.”

It took a moment for Qui-Gon to realize what was wrong; they were standing - or, in his case, trying not to hunch over from tiredness and dehydration - in the middle of the cave so tall that the walls disappeared into the stark play of light and shadow up high, but the man’s voice didn’t echo, falling flat. He stood in the pillar of white, harsh desert light, which streamed from the opening far above their heads. An unassuming brown robe, a raised hood. 

The man’s Force presence was even more discordant in reality than in Shmi Skywalker’s memories. It was like watching a deceptively calm pool full of hungry, thrashing creatures under the surface, causing jolts and sudden splashes. The Force crackled around the man, urgently whispering something Qui-Gon didn’t understand. 

It was perhaps a more disconcerting realization than anything else in this force forsaken mission: he didn’t understand.

“I wasn’t aware we had an appointment,” Qui-Gon answered. He had wasted so much time chasing rumours and fever dreams in these wastelands; the man’s remark sounded like a taunt. Perhaps the man had been watching him from afar, from the cover of the rocky hills, this whole time.

Summer solstice, the tales had said. Enter the cave in the Crimson Rocks on the summer solstice, and you can encounter Death and challenge him to a game of chances. 

The local calendar year wasn’t anywhere near that date. 

The man shrugged. “You’re later than usual. Therefore I thought something must have held you.” His voice was soft.

“Have we met?” Qui-Gon scowled. His saber hand twitched. It was ridiculous; the man’s presence was odd, true, but not threatening apart from its strangeness, and most definitely foreign to him.

Another half-shrug. The small gesture kindled something in his brain. The tiny voice in the back of his head started to prattle nervously, but he couldn’t afford the distraction. 

“From a certain point of view, we have” the man said. “I know what you’re seeking.” He sounded...politely distant?

“You know about the Chosen one, then?” Qui-Gon asked. It was a stupid question, considering the revelations in Shmi’s memories, but he had to ensure the man wasn’t a threat to Anakin. 

The man stilled. He had been motionless before, but now it seemed he had stopped himself altogether. “Why are you asking that? You have never asked that before.”

_This is a ruse, a trick,_ Qui-Gon seethed in his mind. _I have never asked anything from you._

“You seem to have a vantage point,” he said, years of diplomacy put to good use, not letting his bewilderment show. “I’m afraid I cannot answer your question unless I know what knowledge I have acquired...before.” Maybe the man was confusing him with someone else? Maybe he was reliving a memory of some other pilgrim seeking him out? 

“You sound…” the man breathed, and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. The future is easy to see, impossible to pin down.”

The last sentence had a feeling of a rhyme or proverb. “Were you a Jedi? Or were you taught about the Force? Is that how you to remember me?” Qui-Gon asked carefully. 

The man barked a laugh, dry, hacking. “You are a hard man to forget, master Jinn.”

Not misidentification then. He didn’t have many bargaining chips in his hand, but what else was left but to play? 

“If you show me your face, I’ll tell you why I asked about the Chosen one,” he offered.

He could feel the eyes from the shadow of the hood like two ice shards on his skin. “You weren’t that interested in me before, merely in what I had to offer,” the man remarked, sounding almost caustic.

“Perhaps something is altered then,” Qui-Gon shot back. “This _is_ a cave of chances, is it not?”

The man stood quiet for a long time, the light of the desert and the Light of the Force equally severe around him. Then he raised his bony, melasma and tattoo-covered hands and removed his hood.

_There is no green. There is no green!_ The voice in the back of his head yelled shrilly, terrified beyond reasoning. Qui-Gon recoiled by instinct; a visceral reaction all his training and experience couldn’t subdue.

The eyes drilling into him were washed-out blue, like boundless desert sky, with a grey of iron beneath. The power of the Force seared, purifying. 

They were the most blessed and the loneliest eyes. 

Qui-Gon was afraid his knees would give under him; he wanted to weep, to rail against them. 

There was no green. 

The man wore the slightest smile on his lined face, almost hidden by the neatly trimmed, white beard. “You don’t usually recognize me, master.”

“ _What is this?_ ” his voice, coarse and breaking, failed him completely.

“How this came to be?” the man’s - Obi-Wan’s? But _how… -_ voice was deceptively mild. “Time makes fools of us all, master. Anything is possible in the Force.”

_I should have recognized that, I should have!_ Qui-Gon thought, and tried to push down the befuddling panic. His apprentice’s - his young knight’s - voice always got softer the more stressed he was, the more he strove for control.

Somebody had been paying very close attention.

His ignited saber hissed, and his voice was reduced to a hiss too, because how the apparition _dared_ to do this, to imply that he...it...knew enough to imitate like this. “What are you?”

There was no green.

The old man, an aged distortion of his loved one, spread his hands in front of him, deliberately showing his empty palms. His eyes, his voice, and the Light around him suddenly sounded like iron being wrought, warning Qui-Gon not to take one step forward. 

“Given any thought to the Whills lately?”

Qui-Gon stared at him. “...What?” he spat finally, gripping the hilt tighter; the blade was the only green thing left in the universe, the reassuring hum the only familiar thing in any of this. 

“Answer the question,” the apparition ordered, and the iron wailed, bent and deferred. 

He stared some more. “Not in a very long time. I became...obsessed, for a while, after Xanatos, but then…” _Then Obi-Wan came, and lit my heart, and what use I had for the thoughts of afterlife, especially to the one asking such extreme sacrifices?_

The fraud blinked, and just like that, the power was contained, put under the surface once more. “You’re speaking the truth,” it stated. “In any case, I remember only a few instances when you have been here that early.”

His shell-shocked brain tried to scrape up a response that would shed a fleck of light upon this insane conversation. 

“When I am here then, usually?” he finally came up, not seeing any other option but to play by the absurd rules.

The image of the old man smiled again. It was crooked, fast, and so isolated that something seized in Qui-Gon’s chest as a response, in spite of the nonsense the apparition was sprouting.

“Your apprentice turns twenty-one that year, I think. He thinks you’re on Auratera, on a sabbatical. Many times you are, sometimes your search leads you elsewhere. I’ll find you anyway. You are shaken badly by something that year, and it drives you back to your old compulsion. In all this time you haven’t told me what it was that had you so uprooted,” the man mused, stroking his beard, seemingly not noticing the shift in his pronouns. 

By all that was holy in the Force, there had to be something else he could do than just gape like an affronted eopie, but the sheer absurdity of it all…

“I have been to Auratera, a few years ago,” he confirmed, at loss of what else to do. “I came back home to my padawan without meeting you, or at least without any memories of doing so.”

“No, not this time,” the man admitted slowly. “Tell me then, has Anakin already attended the podrace? We are on Tatooine, yes? I believe you haven’t another moment to waste, before you have to hurry back.” Something hidden in the Force around the man reared its head, the unintelligible whispering intensifying, the lack of echo growing even more disturbing.

“That...that was more than seven standard months ago,” Qui-Gon said, and was rewarded with an honest reaction at last. 

The shock roared in the Force. The man’s shields, so interwoven with the Light that they had been invisible to Qui-Gon’s Force sight, suddenly shook and crumbled like in an earthquake. The man’s hand dropped from his face and he opened his mouth, but no sound came out. 

The icy blue hum joined the green in the cave’s stifling air. The saber wasn’t the one Qui-Gon knew intimately, but he could recognize his former padawan’s handprint anywhere, although simplified, more sophisticated. The familiarity hit him like he was being knocked out cold by a blunt handle to the forehead. Was this...this creature rummaging around his mind without him even noticing, sucking out impressions and knowledge that even he had a hard time putting into words?

“How are you alive?” the man breathed. The Light thundered in the cave, reverberating from the shock and righteous fury.

_The truth,_ the Force prompted, cutting through the emotional and literal maelstrom, steadfast and without pretense, and he had never been more grateful.

“My padawan saved me,” he confessed. 

The man’s saber shut off; the blue glacier water, vaporized in the mercy of the planet. The man took one, unsteady step forward, his peculiar eyes glazed. The Light around him calmed, stood open like an offing after the ceasing of the storm. “Never before I could... Look at me. _Look_ at me, master, please. Oh, this was such a long time ago, how is this different, _how_ …Qui-Gon.”

Nobody said his name like that except one, the old man’s rasp irrelevant. He opened his shields carefully, filament after filament, and reached out.

Loneliness. Sadness, vaster than the offing. Strength and determination like folded iron, bent and battered and bent and bent, unbroken. The hard won lessons; a mastery. 

Unbearable kindness.

Unwavering flame. 

_I’m crying,_ Qui-Gon noticed detachedly, some small part of him despising the waste of water. The tears disappeared into his unkempt beard. 

He finally knew what to ask. “When are you? What happened to you, dear one?”

The old man, _Obi-Wan,_ winced at the endearment like Qui-Gon had raised his hand against him.

“You always think about the Whills in the past,” Obi-Wan started, voice thin and hesitant. “You think, and sometimes you even have time to go at some point, but for some reason, you leave it unfinished for a long time. Until I need to learn something for the one last time.” 

“But...but the price. The price is immense, I remember. It asks you to give up _everything_. Every connection, every bond. Even the few Jedi who remember the riddle don’t assume themselves to be capable of that, not even the most self-sufficient of us. I remember contemplating, after Xanatos, but I realized eventually that a desire to escape wasn’t the ultimate surrender required. I couldn’t do it,” Qui-Gon stammered through his second confession.

The man looked at him, and Qui-Gon had never felt more strongly that he was under the Force’s gaze as he was then, under those blue eyes. 

“You once told me, master, that compassion is a learned skill. So is everything that makes us _us._ It can be relearned. It takes an infinite time to achieve, but in the Force, time really doesn’t matter. Everything we must give up, we can relearn. I could give you up, and...Anakin, and Luke, and others, because I knew that it could be relearned. This is what the Force asked of me, in exchange. I gave everything to the Light, and this way, I could stay. I’m needed, for a while yet. You taught me this. Will teach me this.”

Qui-Gon had been squeezing the saber handle so tightly his hand was tingling. The weapon now fell to the ground with the echoing clank, the hum cut off.

“You’re dead,” he whispered. The fluctuating, foreign Force around the man made sense. “And you’re still here, out of time, because of the secrets of the Whills. You say _I_ taught you this?”

The man took a deep breath, and Qui-Gon could see how serenity settled over him, how the Force caressed the other man - the ghost? -, his shields once again in place. Even when he knew they were there, he couldn’t perceive them. A true mastery at work.

“In my time, and in all the other parallels I have been allowed to see, yes. I can watch from the sidelines, but I can do little, because I usually can’t get through. You said it was the same for you for a long time. The only things I can do are these: meeting you and revealing you the Whills, and protecting Anakin when he is very little, because I now know how the Sith are already aware of him. I can do these two, because I already remember how to achieve them, because I have done them already, if that makes sense. To everything else, the Force says, watch. To everything else, it says, balance. To everything else, it says, witness. Except Luke. And now, you.” 

“I don’t know what’s different, this time,” the other Obi-Wan, older, battered and brilliance, continued. “Is it for the better or worse, is this a chance or a false hope? How..how is Anakin, master? Did they allow you to train him? Is he here with you?” Something about the way the man said ‘Anakin’ scratched raw, in spite of the powerful shields of a master. 

“Anakin is mine to call a student, but not a padawan,” Qui-Gon said. “I’m but one master to him. He needs a community around him, a resemblance of family. He latches on too tightly otherwise. His master found out, like he did about the compulsion too. Your compulsion.”

The ghost closed his eyes. “Perhaps it’s that simple,” he breathed. “Force will it to be enough. Always before...the Force told me, the Dark will find him first if I won’t do it.”

Qui-Gon wanted to go to the man, to the ghost. He didn’t know what he wanted to do after that, only that he longed to take away at least some of everything this man carried so effortlessly and with such loneliness and sorrow.

“Why you didn’t think about the Whills? What’s different? What stopped you?” the ghost demanded suddenly, eyes still tightly closed, each word pulled out of his mouth like infected teeth. 

“I didn’t think about the Whills because you came to me. Are you saying I have to do it for you nonetheless?” Was this the true Trial his grandmaster had foreseen? “Do I condemn you to this, dearest one? I don’t think it’s in my rights to carry out such a sacrifice. Myself, my feelings, yes. But you...don’t ask me that.”

The man’s eyes flew open. “Your feelings?”

He didn’t know. Why didn’t he know? How cruel, how literally and figuratively heartless was this other master Jinn who had gone and apparently died, and then had finished his old compulsion and taught it to his padawan so that he was caught in an endless journey of repetition with the Force?

He had been so wrong. He had asked _everything_ from this man.

“My feelings for you. That’s what uprooted me, that year I went to Auratera. That’s what I tried to give up, what scared me witless. Obi-Wan, I serve the Force from my whole heart, but I can’t give my heart to it. It doesn’t belong to me to give away. Not, it seems, before I was dead and you needed me. He never told you this? He must have convinced himself that it would only do harm.”

The man was shaking his snow white head. “I… I know that you care for me, master. I never dreamed that - That this would be the answer... It was so long ago, but you...you were my world -” 

How could mere words wound like that? 

“- once, but the world burned after that, Qui-Gon. It burned to ashes.”

The whispering increased suddenly without any visible reason, seething with urgency and worry. The man raised his head and frowned.

“I don’t have much time left. This time is different. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, except that you...you speak like you did in my dreams, when I yearned for you. I don’t know if you should go to the Whills this time. The sacrifice and teachings gave me means, the Dark has no hold over me, but the knowledge was too late for everyone and Anakin. If it’s not too late now…”

The yell in the Force, travelling through impossible distances, cut off the man’s speech, the voice young and clear and frantic. _“Ben! Ben Kenobi, where are you? Ben, I need help!”_

“Listen,” old Obi-Wan said emphatically. “There’s something askew inside me, around this time. When you died, it solidified to impermeability, to duty and nothing else. I had to do it, when you died, because if I had lost control then, I wouldn’t have stopped. But I realized it too late, and Anakin didn’t see me through it, and I broke it far too belatedly and -”

_“BEN!”_ A scream now, adolescent, full of distress. 

“You have already broken it. It served its purpose, it saved us both,” Qui-Gon hurried to assure. 

The man locked his eyes on Qui-Gon’s. “The change, then. It must be possible. This too, I may still be able to change. Force be with you, Qui-Gon Jinn.” He seemed to reach some sort of decision at the last possible moment. “Coruscant is not sa-”

The Force exploded outwards from one, high-density spot that was Ben Kenobi, knocking Qui-Gon off his feet before they had time to say anything more. The dust danced and danced in the empty pillar of light pouring above him.

***

**After VI (afterword)**

In failed meditation, repeatedly:

The Force had tried to tell him, had tried to warn him, he realized. It had showed him Obi-Wan, again and again. He had thought it was his attachment, his yearning, blinding him.

Obi-Wan, whose sacrifice for him had already set him on this path, he now knew, his powers already manifested, all because of him, Qui-Gon, and his pride and fear at the Theed.

What he had done, what he _would_ do _?_ Gods save Obi-Wan from it all, from _him_ and his compulsions and _his_ sacrifices this time _._

_From the world burned into ash._

_From unbearable loneliness._

Wasn't it enough that he had once failed a padawan and lost him to the Dark, but now he was supposed to live with the very real future where he would fail the dearest of them in _Light?_

He would not. The change, the excision must be possible. He would do what he must. He would not inflict this. He would have to warn the Order, make everyone believe this, but somehow remove himself from the equation at the same time. _How?_

He had never detested the Force in his life, but he came very close to starting when the answer presented itself. 

***

A variation of an old nightmare; Qui-Gon standing in the middle of the pool, wave after wave of the rusty, red liquid circulating, breaking. His master had turned his back on him, and couldn’t seem to hear Obi-Wan calling him from the shore. Qui-Gon’s hair ran down his back, damp and heavy. 

“Mister Jedi? We’re approaching Coruscant in 45 minutes. There’s a bit of a jam on the orbit, but nothing too serious.”

His internal clock was all messed up. 

Obi-Wan blinked at the low ceiling of his sleeping box, eyes dry and itching. The hostess droid was already pushing its cart onward after opening the hatch. The fluorescent lights lining the corridor were turned low. Three containers down, a travelling salesman Mon Calamari snored like an overflowing sewer. 

The small monitor to his right flashed; they would arrive to the third southwest docking platform a few minutes after midnight. The Temple was half an hour shuttle bus ride away. Thank the stars it was a weeknight. 

His right side had twinged from turning his head to check the monitor, reminding him the healing trance had been cut short and that he had lost his bacta patches. The taskmaster would be most displeased. 

He eased himself out of the sleeping tube with care. Around him, the multi-stored corridors spread out, the whale-like, old cruiser full of beings in the small sleeping boxes, in varying states of dreaming, waking up and grumbling. 

He was soaked in old sweat. The floor’s communal fresher displayed a lopsided out of service sign. 

New knights truly didn’t travel with any special accommodations, unless shipyards’ corporate interests or Chosen ones were involved, he thought with sour amusement.

***

Speaking of Chosen ones, he spotted a familiar small figure in the shadows at Temple’s terminus, despite the lateness of the hour. 

“Did master Windu approve you meeting me this late?” he asked, attempting a rebuking tone, but an inadvertent smile pulled his lips. After their joint diplomatic mission, Anakin had made a habit of meeting him whenever he was returning to the Temple. He had looked as confused about being there as Obi-Wan had felt, the first time, but the Force had curled around them both, lightening, so who was he to resist? Anakin had surprised him with a hug, and had proceeded to prattle about everything and nothing with him while they walked side by side back to the Temple, from the newest tidings of Shmi Skywalker to the latest Temple gossip. It was perplexing, how the talkative little tail eased his often mission-heavy mind.

The boy might be conforming to the life of a Jedi padawan - in their previous meeting he had mentioned that master Billaba had started his diplomatic training for his introduction to the Senate. His nose had scrunched in a telling way, and Obi-Wan had remembered Yoda’s promise, and he had had to suppress yet another smile, because Anakin’s emotions were still displayed as clear as day to the trained eye. 

This time Anakin wasn’t even trying, a mixed look of defiance and guilt on his face.

“No,” he admitted outright. “And he specifically told me not to tell you anything. Master Depa said it was none of my business.” 

At least he was honest. Still, it was so unheard of, a _padawan_ acting this way, openly declaring his disobedience to his master’s orders, that Obi-Wan stopped and grabbed Anakin’s shoulders, suddenly grateful of his late-hour arrival. Less witnesses to this scene, the better.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “If you’re displeased with your master, I assure you Anakin, this is _not_ the way. You don’t handle it publicly like this!”

Anakin’s whole face puckered angrily, something Obi-Wan hadn’t seen before. 

“They don’t let you decide for yourself!” he exclaimed. “They won’t tell you, none of them! It’s wrong!” The melodious voice of the child seemed disproportionately loud at the almost deserted terminus. 

“If your master has forbidden something, he has good reasons,” Obi-Wan hurried to reassure the boy. He had clearly worked himself up for Obi-Wan, over some, probably imagined, slight.

“Stupid reasons! It’s not good enough for master Qui-Gon to suffer this bad. You guys seem to think there’s something noble in it, in suffering and sacrifices. There’s not! You do it all the time, needlessly! There’s enough times when it’s needed!” Anakin’s shoulders shook under Obi-Wan’s hands, the boy’s indignation heaving his whole body.

The actual words registered. 

“Master Jinn?” he whispered, catching his shock surging in the Force just in time. Qui-Gon was back? At the Temple? For how long? Why hasn’t anybody, why hasn’t Qui-Gon…?

“ _Don’t_ call him that, everybody else calls him that but you and I!” Anakin huffed, and pulled himself free from Obi-Wan’s unresisting grip. “You have to do something! Nobody else is doing bantha’s shit. They just say it’s not their business, but is between the Force and him, some Trial or something.”

He knew he had overcome his own Trial. He had known since Haermaenie. His love was inseparable from his duty, from his devotion. It would never surpass them, but would always ensure him performing them to the utmost of his ability. He had been waiting to tell Qui-Gon face to face, searching for a pride and joy shining in his eyes, not wanting to disturb Qui-Gon’s quest.

He had thought their Trial shared. Clearly Qui-Gon’s path had led him elsewhere, from joy to suffering, if he was to believe Anakin Skywalker. 

“Where is he?” he rasped. 

Anakin’s body slumped from relief in Coruscant's relative darkness. “They talk about the Sand Gardens, other padawans. I’m not allowed to even go near them.”

Kriff boundaries. Kriff his own fear that the outcome of Qui-Gon’s Trial would be… but no. Nothing was worth Qui-Gon being pain, not even if it meant a surrender greater than Obi-Wan had ever experienced before. 

“Apologize to your master, and find a way to mean it,” he shouted out over his shoulder at the drooped form. “I’ll find you later, I promise!”

***

The meeting ended earlier than Mace had thought it would. After Qui-Gon’s return, and his… you could probably call his attempt a report, in a very, very broad sense of the word, Council gatherings had turned even longer, and even more conflicted. He hadn’t thought that was possible.

_Witness me. Witness what I have caused, what I will cause to those under my protection._

_Coruscant is not safe._

Curse that stubborn, stubborn man.

A dull headache had resided in the back of Mace’s skull for days now, ever since the wayward master had returned, stumbling out from the cargo ship, wild-eyed and peremptory. The Force teetering like this, on the thin kriffing string indeed, ready to plunge on either direction, the shatterpoint prolonging and prolonging itself until it became unrecognizable, set his teeth on edge like very few other things could.

One of the very few other things waited for him in their quarters, forehead pressed to the floor, a traditional, ancient position he didn’t know his padawan was even aware of. Frankly, he would have preferred it to stay that way, considering the difficulties Anakin’s past already set between him and learning. The light latemeal of fruit and cheese waited for him at the table; his padawan was surprisingly good with food, when the mood struck him.

Something was off.

“Master,” Anakin greeted him.

“Padawan,” he answered, and refused to grit his teeth, but was quite sure the boy sensed it through their training bond anyway. He never remembered the bond between him and Depa being as leaky as theirs on both sides. “Let’s hear it. What has happened?”

“I did something. I can’t be sorry I did it, but I’m so, so sorry I had to break your orders to do it, and I seek forgiveness,” Anakin confessed, determined. “I’m ready to accept my punishment now, master.”

How he could have forgotten that taking a padawan on top of sitting on the Council was the worst idea ever?

No choice. Well, clearly his padawan had felt the same way, whatever he had gotten into his brash head this time. 

“Let’s hear your transgressions before we start dealing out punishments,” he opted to say.

Anakin took a deep breath, and the shatterpoint, the screaming emptiness of Light and life residing in Mace’s head, exploded like New Year’s fireworks. 

***

The beard was the first thing Obi-Wan noticed. Much longer than usually, unkempt; a bird could have used it for nesting.

He had never been here before. He knew some masters used these Gardens for teaching, but Qui-Gon hadn’t even mentioned them before he had been a senior padawan for several years. He knew he must be breaking at least a dozen traditions by charging in here like this. 

He wasn’t sure what to think about all the sand and geometry; it was a place where Temple’s simple, majestic lines turned into austerity. At night, with the stark play of the garish lights and shadows that was Coruscant, it appeared ominous. 

Not a place where he had ever imagined Qui-Gon would meditate. 

Yet here his former master sat, legs crossed, large palms resting on his knees, chest rising and falling slowly, way too slowly for Obi-Wan’s liking. A sallow pallor colored his face behind his beard; his long limbs were unusually rigid, his presence submerged and hard to read.

Obi-Wan crouched and forced himself to observe impartially, pushing his emotions out of the way, cataloging tells and marks. The breathing pattern. The eye movements. The fine sheen of cold sweat.

This wasn’t an every-day meditation anymore, but True Clarity, a rare, laborious purging technique meant for rooting out the negative and darkness from your core with utmost asperity.

Touching Qui-Gon now could be dangerous. 

He eased himself carefully down, opposite Qui-Gon, kneeling with his toes tucked under him. The sand had already cooled after the day’s heat. It hissed faintly around him; the night hurried on, faraway flashing lights and the never ceasing traffic, shadows and occasional radiance chasing each other on Qui-Gon’s locked face under Obi-Wan’s watchful gaze. 

The rising happened gradually, so slowly it was like watching a rock being eroded by the water, but finally Qui-Gon’s eyelashes fluttered. He blinked several times, unfocused, at Obi-Wan.

“Master,” Obi-Wan said quietly. 

Qui-Gon’s eyes closed. “Yet again,” he murmured, resignedly.

“It’s me,” Obi-Wan insisted, bemused. “What’s wrong? Why this place?”

Qui-Gon didn’t open his eyes. He extended his hand and caught Obi-Wan’s cheek, unbalanced, swinging them just a little. When Obi-Wan had recaptured his balance, he realized his former master was mouthing something soundlessly. 

He was repeating Obi-Wan’s name, over and over. 

“Alright, it’s alright,” he soothed, perplexed and more than a little on edge. Rare was the time indeed when Qui-Gon wasn’t in charge of himself like this, and it was usually due to some severe mind altering, high doses of malicious drugs, or both. 

_Or maybe padawans just aren’t supposed to see their masters like this,_ a whisper in his mind.

Well, he wasn’t a padawan anymore, but a knight, and what he hoped to be for this master surpassed all the old boundaries.

“Beloved. Whatever it is,” he said, determinedly, weighing his words on his tongue. The large, heavy-breathing body stiffened. Qui-Gon blinked owlishly at him, a pure astonishment in his features. 

“What...what did you just…?” Qui-Gon’s voice was hoarse. Obi-Wan remembered Haermaenie. The sky was limitless, vast, the falling into it an ecstasy. 

_Beloved._ The utmost audacity of name-claiming things when Jedi did not do that. 

“It’s my Trial and its outcome,” Obi-Wan stated firmly.

Qui-Gon surged forward and kissed him.

It was nothing like the few earlier kisses they had shared, whose memory Obi-Wan had cherished. Those kisses have been of discovery, of unbelieving surprise, of elation and of long-buried want. This kiss tasted of iron-like sadness and choking from lack of oxygen. 

It tasted like farewell.

He pulled himself free and stared at his former master, truly frightened this time. Qui-Gon looked back at him, a joyless smile playing on lips, his eyes shimmering. “Force, just...just a few more hours, and I could have had enough strength to do this without pulling you in.”

“I don’t -” Obi-Wan started, but Qui-Gon continued talking over his words. “I’m going to annihilate my shields. Witness me now please, knight Kenobi. If you want nothing to do with me afterwards, I understand.”

Qui-Gon Jinn had this annoying habit: sometimes he said the most horrible and nonsensical things like he was discussing about Coruscanti weather. _No one_ annihilated their shields if they had any other choice; it was either an ultimate act of penance, or an extreme act of punishment for losing completely one’s reliability in the Order’s eyes. 

Even the feared mind probe wasn’t like annihilation; the probe went deep and dug and turned every stone and put everything under the magnifying glass, but it didn’t leave the object defenceless to the world like they were walking without their skin, one big exposed nerve end, helpless, and most importantly, unavoidably true and nothing else but true, beyond any doubt. 

Everything in conscious beings fought against it since infancy; nobody, not even Jedi, was meant to know themselves like that, much less let the others witness them like that. It often led to madness. 

“ _Stop_ calling me a knight. Qui-Gon, don’t -!”

“I do what I must. Force help me to make it enough.”

_He has tried to do this before, recently,_ Obi-Wan had time to realize, horrified, as Qui-Gon’s tattered and deteriorated presence opened in the Force - once so utterly breathtaking, vibrant, strong, all encompassing; how he _dared_ to try True Clarity in this state, how he _dared_ to put himself in unnecessary danger like that when Obi-Wan - before the vortex of impressions, smells, sounds, feelings, memories, hidden embarrassments and traumas and the screaming anguish threatened to swallow him whole. 

_< Witness.>_

The cave of chances. He knew of this place because...he had been here before? But he had never - 

Everything turned upside down, inside out, unwinding from the end back to the beginning and slammed into his mind with the force of charging, roaring ranchor. He screamed into the Force, and the Force stifled it like he would have yelled to the headwind in the middle of the raging storm. And he still knew it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was for Qui-Gon. 

Absence, like nothing he had ever experienced. It wasn’t a feeling anymore, it was his brains, his bones, his cells, his desperately gasping lungs, permeating everything and everywhere until he was nothing but an outline for a whole different being. Purity. Power. Boundless regret.

Perfect sacrifice, and perfect command in the Light of the Force. A mastery. Alone. 

A single flame. All around it, nothing but dark, flying ashes in the desert wind, as far as the eye could see.

_IdidthistohimIwilldothistohimnononopleaseForce_ **_no_ ** _askanythingelseIwillgivehimupIwillgiveupeverythingelse._

_ <It’s not your choice to make!> _he managed to shout into the storm, wondering why half of the Temple hadn’t already descended on them, searching for the source of such disturbance, such undeniable warning.

When it was over, when he came back to himself - and it took no longer than it took one hovercar to fly over their heads on the line, headlights sweeping over them, blinding him for a second as he was clutching Qui-Gon’s limp form in his arms - he knew. He remembered. 

And he knew what conclusions his former master had drawn from the encounter.

Infuriating, stubborn, proud man, who had overcome so much fear for Obi-Wan, but who had taken this on his own shoulders, who thought only he knew how to act, had taken over the responsibility and guilt like he _always_ did and didn’t know how to put them down, but instead turned them into a kriffing lazerproof, heavy armor against the Galaxy and hid behind them.

No longer. Seven siths and their offspring, no longer.

“How did you lose your way, my master?” he asked, sweating profusely, swaying back and forth just a little with the dead weight in his embrace. “What happened? We only know what we are, but know not what we may be. You have no right to try to take yourself away from me like this, when your fear is based on the future’s ashes _._ ” 

He really didn’t expect Qui-Gon to answer, and startled when the master coughed weakly, wetly, and grabbed his collar uncoordinatedly.

“Found a present moment I couldn’t stand. To... to know what would befall on you, that I catalyzed it forward every time…”

“It’s not your _choice,_ it’s not your right to sacrifice, but mine!” It was almost a shout, but Obi-Wan trapped it into a furious hiss at the last moment; it came out strangled. “You don’t get to decide that my future is without you simply by walking out of it and leave me behind! I swear to gods and saints and Force and _Siths,_ Qui-Gon, if you do this one more time…”

“Not...leave behind. Save you. From _that._ Protect you.. from the horrible future. I had to try to...cut myself off. Not leading you any further.” More wet coughing. The hand crept forward on Obi-Wan’s neck, sought his cheek. He leaned onto it, against his will, breathing coming in gasps and bursts. Gods, stars, this was way too much like Theed.

“It’s already different. I have already made my choice. Beloved, I have already done what you fear. I already have this knowledge, after I commanded dark and light for the first time and brought you back to me.”

The hand Obi-Wan was leaning on was clammy, Qui-Gon’s forehead was clammy and sweaty; he was never like this, he was warm and vibrant and a kriffing human radiator, and his smile and his Force presence weren’t these brittle, tattered, contorted things.

“You.” Qui-Gon whispered. “How you name things. My Trial was always to accept that...that it isn’t enough, but the opposite. I can give up almost everything. But it isn’t enough to prevent anything, because I’m not alone, but with you; I don’t know better anymore. I can only...only love you, helplessly. That love has to be enough, even when it isn’t, when it never has been enough before.”

“He never knew.” Obi-Wan choked, head reeling. “Not like I do. Not like you are telling me now. It will be enough.”

His former master coughed, and closed his eyes. The hand dropped to the sand, the pulse light and fast like the heartbeat of newly hatched bird. 

***

Yoda led them in from the entrance, a group consisting of all the members of the Council present at the Temple. Most of them wore their night clothes, sabers close at hand nonetheless, eyes alert and gleaming in the dimness. He didn’t look up, holding unconscious Qui-Gon in his arms, lopsided by their height difference. He could hear the collective intake of air when Qui-Gon’s ragtag presence, completely torn open in the Force, registered. Obi-Wan simply nodded at the grandmaster of the Order. He had never seen a look like that on Yoda’s sedate face before; bittersweet and resigned. 

“Is there healer at present?” he called feebly, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the weight in his arms. He wasn’t surprised as Vokara Che stepped forward; the disturbance had surely woken the whole Temple. “What happens now?” he asked quietly, determinedly ignoring the silent onlookers. The master healer shook her lekku slowly, her dignity untouched by her dressing gown. “Not many beings want to come back after Annihilation. It’s his decision. After that, each case is different. He will not be the same, that’s all I can promise.”

_You should all know better, but you let him go into this, because of the blasted Trial and blasted rules and blasted boundaries and because you fear that if you feel a little compassion, it leads to destruction. Well, guess what._

His anger was distant and useless thing, and he gave it up to the Force almost before he recognized it for what it was.

“Qui-Gon Jinn has much more reason than most who undergo Annihilation to come back. The Force will guide him, knight Kenobi. He came back to us bearing a warning, a terrible vision from the future, and ensured tonight that we couldn’t doubt it,” Mace Windu declared, his voice, even when subdued, echoing in the air.

_He couldn’t stand the future of himself sacrificing me that way, so he ran. He ran, because we don’t think - we are not taught - that love is able to change anything._

Adi Gallia raised her hands, her voice clear, not hushed like Mace’s, but ringing with a steelhard accusation. “As a Keeper of the Trial of knight Obi-Wan Kenobi and master Qui-Gon Jinn, I witness and proclaim the Trial finished. Is there someone who wants to challenge the Keeper’s word?” 

The silence followed Tholothian master’s words, but Obi-Wan hardly paid attention. Qui-Gon was far, very far, and everything else in Obi-Wan’s world was retreating. 

  
_Force, are you letting me hear his words, only to take him away? Will you ask me that?_


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well well well, isn't that antheiasilva's betaing which made this chapter hell of a lot better. I see you, betaing.

“Master Obi-Wan. Master Obi-Wan. Master Obi-Wan.”

Someone small, insistent, remotely irritating, cutting through his vigil. Hands tucking the hem of his cloak. He hadn’t gone back and changed, had he? Still the same clothes, smelling of space travel, shock and sweat. 

“Master Obi-Wan. I can help. Master Obi-Wan, I can help!” 

Anakin. Behind him, in the door frame, master Windu, scowling. Funny, how a few months ago his anxiety would have spiked from that look on any Council member’s face.

“Knight Kenobi. Listen to my padawan, even though I like very little of what he has to say,” the Head of the Order commanded, as Obi-Wan’s attention wandered back to the still form resting on the top of the covers, hands crossed on the chest and long hair cascading from the pillows. _“Annihilated beings come back together following their own schedule, if they decide to come back at all. We must wait.”_ Master Che’s words echoed in his mind, rousing no feeling in Obi-Wan that he could recognize.

_“You fill me with joy.”_ Surely, surely you would come back to the one who brought you joy, after your duty and self-imposed punishment were fulfilled?

“Master Obi-Wan, sir. I can help! I...I can get through any person’s barriers, if I concentrate hard enough. I _hate_ it - there’s no other word for it, master, I’m sorry. I can finally do something good with my powers! You tell master Qui-Gon to come back, you’re the only one he listens to when he runs away!”

_If only that were so, little one._

“Vokara says it’s not without risks, but worth trying,” master Windu said gravely, heavily. He seemed to struggle a short while before he got his next words out. “She thinks your bond might be strong enough, after the Trial.”

_Bond? There’s no bond left. We unraveled it,_ Obi-Wan thought, distracted, and realized only a few seconds later that he had spoken the words aloud. 

Anakin was shaking his head so violently that he actually managed to swing his stub of a padawan braid. “I saw it too, master Obi-Wan, I have seen it a long time. The Force between you two _remembers._ I can show you. I can feed my strength to you. My master and healers promised look after us both.”

At that, Obi-Wan raised his eyes and meet Korun master’s dark gaze. Head of the Order? More than approving, assisting this? 

Master Windu bristled some more, but finally sighed and nodded. 

“My padawan creates shatterpoints that I wouldn’t have thought possible before, for this Order or for the future in general,” he growled. 

_“Change, change, change. Mace has seen the absence too. It’s in his head, screaming. He will do whatever it takes, whatever changes, to save the future of the Order.”_ An echo, so close to his own voice. And Master Windu excelled at correcting mistakes. 

Obi-Wan found himself nodding. “Thank you Anakin.”

Healer Onossa’s sigh was deeper than anyone else’s that night after she stepped inside and realized who her charges were. 

***

He walked under the distant, quietly burning stars for a long time. There was no moon, and the desert around him didn’t change, soundless, windless. He followed something, not a single golden string, long ago terminated, but a thermal image of the thread, burning in the corner of his eye very, very faintly. Without Anakin’s added strength and determination, it would have remained invisible to him.

He thought he was imagining things when one of the stars near the horizon started to draw nearer. He walked, and the sand disintegrated into a fine clouds of dust under his boots without a sound. The firmament kept turning above him, magnificent, far-off, without the rising sun, without the rising moon, the desert stars calming, lonely and familiar to him for some unfathomable reason.

Little by little, the desert gave way to the hills. He was close enough now to realize the light he had followed wasn’t a star at all, but a small campfire on the mountain slope. He heard running water. He thought he should feel thirsty, or tired, after such a long journey.

Qui-Gon lay down by the fire, looking at the stars, the last wisps from the pipe still lingering around him. Obi-Wan wrinkled his nose; his master had given up the nasty habit years ago.

“I think I can smell the snow. Are we on Auratera?” Obi-Wan guessed while sitting down on the opposite side of the fire. Qui-Gon turned his head towards his voice. He looked sleepy, his eyes half-lidded.

“Yes. Although how you found your way here, padawan, I have no idea. Though I’m not surprised; you were my constant companion here. I wanted to show you everything; make you drink from the brook, water so cold the teeth ached. Make you smell the gargantuan hemlocks in the crisp air.”

“You liked it here, didn’t you?” Obi-Wan asked softly. 

Qui-Gon turned his gaze back at the starlit sky. 

“I detested it here,” he confessed. “I looked at the sky and searched Coruscant, in spite of the beauty and peace of this place. The Core is not visible here, of course. I still searched, night after night.”

“Search no longer, but come back with me? Your quest here has filled its purpose a long time ago.” 

A visible unease flickered on Qui-Gon’s upturned face; a sign in itself that everything wasn’t as it should be. “I...I think I shouldn’t, padawan. Whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. You always think everything’s either success or failure. I don’t tell you this enough, but you _shine_ in so many things you do.”

“I know now, Qui-Gon. You have told me. This hiding is no longer necessary.” 

To his slight irritation, the master laughed.

“Am I hiding? I’m not surprised. You don’t know this yet, padawan, but I’m quite good at hiding in plain sight for my size. I have to hide much, every master hides so much. Except Mace, I suppose. He doesn’t have to hide a thing, the perfect bastard.”

“I’m not your padawan anymore,” Obi-Wan said quietly. Qui-Gon sobered.

“Yes, that would make sense. I can’t have a claim over you anymore if I’m here.”

“Then come back and rename us,” Obi-Wan challenged. “If...if I truly hold your heart in safe keeping as you say, come back and reclaim it.”

Qui-Gon stiffened. “I never told you that,” he breathed. “I would never predispose you like that. The Order doesn’t -”

“You don’t remember now, because you tried to run away from it one last time. Tell me again. Tell me again and again and again, because without you, the world is duty and nothing but duty. I want there to be joy too, after fulfilled duty. If it’s heresy, then it is, but it’s never above the Force,” Obi-Wan’s tone got more heated as his little impromptu speech progressed. Force, this was every hardship and more his master had once said balancing on the tightrope demanded if he took a less traveled path. _I don't want a world that is only duty and servitude,_ he realized, to his own astonishment too. _It’s a world I can sacrifice far too easily and far too cheaply. A world where I’m not enough, but stunted. In front of Anakin, a Chosen one. In front of the Order. In front of the suffering and catastrophe. I refuse to face them without you if I don’t have to._

“I want my world to be whole. Tell me again, and again, and again,” he said fiercely _._

Anakin nudged him, somewhere at the great distance. He ignored it.

Qui-Gon raised himself to the sitting position, a look of intense concentration on his face. Obi-Wan made himself sit still under scrutiny; the master could look at the knight all he wanted, but he no longer had a high ground.

“There’s much missing from me, isn’t there?” Qui-Gon asked quietly. 

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “Look between us. You can see the remnants of the bond. It’s almost like when you look with infrared vision. Follow the thread. It leads you back to us.”

“Back to you? I think I was afraid, at some point, of never finding my way back to you. I am very far away, am I?” 

“Not too far. I’ll wait. Remember this, Qui-Gon. Come and tell me again.” He could feel Anakin’s distress, and slipping, more strongly with every passing moment; boy’s strength, easily comparable to a little sun, wasn’t waning, but Anakin was unaccustomed to directing and controlling his power to this extent, even with the help of the Head of the Order and the expert healer. 

“You’re fading,” Qui-Gon said urgently.

“No, master,” Obi-Wan whispered. “It is you who is fading. Come back. Find joy with me and come back.”

Anakin screamed Obi-Wan’s name, beyond the wastelands and stars, young and scared and in need. The change came; he was able to answer the call of his padawan-brāthn.

***

The Council sent him on a short mission. He had met Adi Gallia’s gaze in the briefing, her eyes stony and determined. He went, performed satisfactorily and without cutting himself any slack, and returned to his vigil by the sun washed bedside, sitting there quietly and watching how the light traveled across Qui-Gon’s closed face.

He didn’t remember the planet’s or the system’s names afterwards in front of the Council, only that the suffering had nearly made him fall on his knees with empathy, and that he had done everything he could to stop it. The Council let him be after that. 

Bant and Garen passed their Trials. Master Yoda went to the Senate with master Windu and Anakin, the first time Anakin attended that special duty; a day which was branded on the memory of all the parties involved for all eternity. 

The healers told him they and their equipment weren’t detecting any change, and even if Qui-Gon woke up, there might not be that much left of him; Obi-Wan said nothing. The light ran its course. Anakin met his eyes over the bedside sometimes, and nodded trustingly.

He grew the beginnings of a beard, decided the style wasn’t for him, shaved it off and started anew. Onossa ribbed him mercilessly. He endured.

In the end, it took his former master far less time than Obi-Wan had needed. He was a gambling man, after all, Obi-Wan teased him much, much later on. 

He was staring at the living room ceiling from the sofa. The morning was creeping in. He was tired but not sleepy, twitchy, laying there under Onossa’s threat that if he didn’t go and rest for the night, she would drag him through the halls by the ear, when the comm link pinged.

After a glance at the source of the transmission he prepared for a super early gossiping; what he got instead, after he turned the sender on, was incoherent noise, a single loud bang, and somebody yelling in a high-pitched, growling accent of a truly pissed off Togruta.

“What- ?” Obi-Wan started.

“Ne! Held it by the _Force_ if you have to, I swear on Mkbuto he _will_ receive this, he has kriffing right to know - hey, Obi-Wan!” Bant sounded out of breath, the swearing peculiar coming from the usually unflappable, timid Mon Calamari. “I don’t have much time, I’m in the kriffing cleaning closet and Ne is out there probably getting her ass fired. Qui-Gon is awake. He is asking you. Some of these hypocrites want him under _quarantine_ , oh, master Gallia is going to reap their sorry asses, she’s so furious about all you two had to-!”

The familiar living room expanded, fathomless and unsteady, like the space itself, the couch sailing in the blackness which danced in his vision. Gods, Force, little gods in the Force. Obi-Wan buried his face into his hands. It was good there was nobody to see him.

“Bant,” he croaked through his fingers, cleared his throat, cutting his friend’s most uncharacteristic angry tirade, and tried again, “is he alright?”

“You should know something, Obi-Wan,” Bant said, her tone changing to the soft gurgling which always meant that she was trying to console him. “It’s the only thing he is saying.”

***

He didn’t slow down, barefoot and without his cloak, exposed to everyone, until he saw Bant standing in front of the austere entrance of the healing ward. His heart was pounding in his ears, and not from the exercise.

Bant said something, several somethings which didn’t register, and led him through the ward, leaving him facing the door alone with the pad of her fin.

He drew a breath, made a small gesture with his forefinger - _frivolous_ , Anakin whooped in his mind - and clasped his hands tightly together in front of him. The door opened.

The Coruscanti morning light was harsh and bright, reflecting merely from the artificial surfaces; it poured from the window, limning the paleness on Qui-Gon’s face, the deep bruises under open and alert eyes. Qui-Gon turned his head on the pillow to the whoosh of opening door; a distant memory from under the stars.

“Obi-Wan.” Mumbled, like Qui-Gon was talking past pebbles in his mouth. _< Obi-Wan.> _Calling in the Force, the pain hazing the sunny air in the room. Qui-Gon extended his hand, and Obi-Wan didn’t step but fell into the room, colliding on the floor next to the bed, catching Qui-Gon’s large palm with both of his hands. Qui-Gon was _here,_ all the shifting shades of the green forest foliage, trying to reroot. It was as distressing to watch as to see a kriffing mountain move and try to find a new place to settle its heavy, groundbound bones. 

Their joined hands formed an anchor point in the muddled, confused pain, the Force draping and binding. Renewing the once unraveled, but still stubbornly utilised bond, strengthened by no other than the Chosen one. Irrefutable for anyone to see.

“Never again. Not in your rights to sacrifice. Not for either of us anymore,” Obi-Wan choked out.

“O-bi-Wan.” _ <I was aberrant, blinded. Have to tell you.> _The words came from the distance, distorted, and obviously caused pain, but the more the Force furled around them, the easier the hearing became.

“Don’t strain yourself. I already know. The change, there’s already change. You can’t tell anymore what’s going to happen to us.”

_ <Can’t tell you aloud right now. Have to tell you.> _

“I know. I know.” 

***

There was a sudden, total silence inside Mace Windu’s throbbing skull for the first time in months and months, without even a polite warning from the Force. He stumbled, having just risen from his seat after a tremendously important voting, grabbed the empty air for leverage, and then Depa was already on his side, supporting him, and his padawan’s worried query reached him through their bond. 

“I’m alright,” he rasped to both of them, shut his eyes and breathed through his nose. An utterly strange feeling, something he hadn’t had any need for since he was five: an urge to cry from relief.

***

_What by the Force were you thinking, when you didn’t_ _request the knight’s quarters after Anakin’s departure,_ Obi-Wan berated himself. Like padawan like master, he was stalling - yeah, better admit it to yourself, Kenobi - in the kitchen while Qui-Gon puttered around the apartment, reacquainting himself, his reversion a caustic and brittle thing in the Force. It made Obi-Wan grind his teeth; he wanted to rush to Qui-Gon’s side and offer his help, but he knew the other man wouldn’t welcome it.

Had Qui-Gon felt the same way about him, all those months ago? 

Some very small and childish part him wailed at his master being in such a state.

And fallible. Infuriably fallible. Human. 

He stared at the eddying sapir in the cups like it would hold the secrets of the universe.

< _I can hear you all the way from the couch. Stop tying yourself into knots and let’s enjoy tea, > _came from the living room.

_ <Coming,> _he sent back, the automatic “Master” somewhere in his throat, but not anywhere near verbalization.

The mysterious demi-gods responsible for the Coruscant climate control had decided that the gentlebeings of the megalopolis had suffered enough from the summer heat, and had sent a forewarned, flashy thunderstorm for all their troubles. Qui-Gon had slept through the storm, gathering strength, a trait Obi-Wan had always envied. 

The repercussions were something of a rarity: a quieted planet, covered in thick, warm mists, through which the skyscrapers, air control towers and electric billboards signaled like old-fashioned beacons. The transparisteel windows sweated. The air was humid, and when Obi-Wan placed the teacups on the table, the steam took a long time to evaporate, rising in lazy curls between them.

The sudden, alarming quietness of the never-silent planet seeped into their quarters. Their home had never been a loud one - not even at times of Anakin visiting - but the recent events only ever highlighted that. 

< _Would you tell me about your missions? > _

He talked until his voice grew hoarse, filling the space, his lone voice subdued by the mists, circling in the muted room much like the steam. Qui-Gon sat still, a delicate teacup almost disappearing into his large hands. If you didn’t know better, you would say that his presence was as it has always been; for Obi-Wan, it was like watching a familiar mountain scenery and finding something caved in and hugely scarred after an avalanche.

Sacrifices, duty, truth; they all came with the price which Jedi had been taught to pay since infancy. Annihilation was simply more irremediable than most.

Annihilation took people’s pride.

He left Haermaenie last, despite the fact that it had been his second independent mission. He wasn’t sure how to put into words the harsher mists of the planet, the bone-deep exhaustion, the slow erosion of his barriers until he had tumbled and fallen into the skies and discovered the truth. 

“I found that my duty is inseparable from my love,” he opted to say, in the end. “It’s who I am, who you and Order and my experiences made me. It upholds the balancing, fuels it.” 

Qui-Gon didn’t answer with words, but his presence enveloped Obi-Wan. The renewed bond between them sang in his head; the depth of feelings, which he had only rarely felt before, heaved around him: shame, wonder. Behind it all, love; he recognized and named it now, insolently, even if Qui-Gon wouldn’t. It was heavy and adamant, like abyssal water of the ocean.

< _Courageous Spitfire. When did you become so forthright? > _

He had several answers on his tongue, and he swallowed them all. _When your fear tried to take you from me. When you yourself tried to take you from me._

_Do you remember us under the stars, what I confessed?_

_You call me courageous, and yet I don’t have the guts to ask if you will always let me see you like this, open, from now on, or is it something that will disappear when you recover._

< _I_ _n the same vein of forthrightness, what do you think the Council would say if I asked for paired missions until you feel more yourself? > _he settled on, mildly, and realized his misstep too late. Qui-Gon’s eyes turned tight, his mouth thinning, like the morning Obi-Wan had offered a razor and warm towel to him. 

(< _You shouldn’t be taking care of me. > _

“It would be a pleasure.”

“Obi-Wan!” < _Don’t. > _

He had left the tools on the sink.)

< _You can’t tie yourself to me like that. You are a capable young knight. Your skills are sorely needed elsewhere, and my missions will be very different from now on. > _

If only the reason behind the denial had been pride. But Qui-Gon was right; the needs of the people, the demands of their duty didn’t diminish just because Obi-Wan had high personal stakes in the game. 

< _Y_ _ou shouldn’t be taking care of me, when I caused this in the first place. > _

“I don’t blame you for wanting to protect me from something like that future, only your first knee-jerk way of _how_ you did it. How you always try to distance yourself from the situation you can’t control,” Obi-Wan said aloud. He kept his frustration carefully hidden but knew he didn’t fool Qui-Gon, not here, not in private. “I don’t want to take care of you because of debt, or because of some twisted sense of duty. It has nothing to do with me being your former padawan, or being honour-bound. Can you accept that at least, even if you refuse to name it.”

“It...would be claiming of me.” The words came back so garbled, monotonic, causing pain. The true scope of recovery remained a mystery to everyone.

“Do you remember Auratera? Our Auratera, not yours? Us under the stars?”

“Yes.”

“Were our Trials so different, in outcome? You know that I welcome, more than welcome, this. If difference is what you have to tell me, then so...so be it, but you must know it won’t change a thing for me. It was enough to catalyze a change in any case.” His voice betrayed him in the end.

The silence fell, heavy and curling, obscuring like the mists. It took a long time for Qui-Gon to break it. 

“No. Forgive me.” / < _I was wrong, acting out of terrible fear, abandoning the most fundamental teachings. > _

Qui-Gon set the cup gingerly down, inhaled. He formed every word meticulously, brows frowned in concentration. “Obi-Wan, my heart has always been your masterpiece and yours alone. There’s no way I can take it back anymore.” < _Most desperately and inadequately. > _

“Then you must know my world would always be insufficient without you.” Obi-Wan’s shivering was back, and so was his instinct to quell, to suppress. <Y _ou saw how it was. Only with duty. Without joy. > _

He wasn’t sure if Qui-Gon tried to say something, or if he just reacted to Obi-Wan’s words, both here and in the Force. The grunt was visceral, near pained, like somebody had struck him to his solar plexus. Obi-Wan rose, his robes rustling in the silent room, not knowing what he would do until he stood in front of Qui-Gon and he looked up to Obi-Wan.

“I’ll rename us every kriffing day if I have to,” he breathed, nudging Qui-Gon’s knees apart with his own. “But you don’t get to decide the outcome of us without me ever again.” 

“Dearest one. I swear not to. I ask forgiveness.” The voice was low, and the words were colored by intonation for the first time since Qui-Gon had woken up. Hope rushed into Obi-Wan’s veins with adrenaline, making his heartbeat thrum in his ears. He couldn’t help but shudder, and his body felt confused that he didn’t turn towards quiet, didn’t follow the Jedi submission taught, carved into him. So much unlearning to do for both of them. 

“Say that again,” he whispered, commanded, ignoring his training bashing him; just _what_ exactly did he think he was doing? Brash, arrogant, profane.

Qui-Gon pulled him forward, and his hands wound around his former master without hesitation, like he did this every day, and the mistakes be **damned** **_._ **

_ <Dearest one. My joy.> _In the Force, Qui-Gon’s voice still held all the nuance and depth and vibration which Annihilation had stripped from him in the waking world. He mouthed the words, soundlessly, into Obi-Wan’s chest, into his tabards, his breath warm and moist through the fabric.

Reclaiming Obi-Wan; keeping him. 

His heart sang like the purest note from the finest Ilum crystal.

“Our joy,” his voice was unsteady. He cleared his throat, wound his arms tighter, sinking his hands to the gray-streaked hair, clutched, willing the small tremors to ease. 

“Have to tell you. Make us see. Each other.” Grating, intense whispers; alongside them, the concealed spikes of pain in the Force. “The new bond. Might allow it.”

“You hurt. Isn’t it too soon?”

< _You held my heart for the longest time; I trust you to be equally tender with my mind. > _

It was so tempting; to have an access to Qui-Gon’s mind, intimately, like master and padawan never could. Vulnerable. Open.

Shred. Unnecessarily sacrificed. Scattered, dissolved. 

< _No. > _ Qui-Gon denied. < _I promised. Have to tell you. Let me tell you. > _

There was nothing liminal in the here and now, no exceptional surroundings, nothing setting Obi-Wan free from responsibility here; this was their familiar quarters, a day like any other.

The mists were dispersing slowly when he took Qui-Gon’s hand and they stepped into master bedroom together. The sunlight was soft and filtered, merciful, nothing like Coruscant’s usual, dramatic light; when Obi-Wan visualized the Light side, it was something like this. It shone in Qui-Gon’s eyes.

He reached in the Force between them, and felt his former master do the same. 

The endless blue of desert sky after a thunderstorm, when everything underneath it blooms, welcomed him.

Obi-Wan came round to moaning low, intermittently, into Qui-Gon’s mouth, eyes closed. They lay entwined in each other’s arms; even harder to disentangle which thought, which impression, which sensation belonged to who in a constant flux of < _Imsorrrynoteveragainshamedsafekeptsogoodyoursyoursyours. > _

The Force circled in the room unhurriedly, concentrating around their merging presences and bodies, boundless, shared.

_He shares himself with me._ The thought was a pure cry of joy.

“Is it always like this?” Obi-Wan panted, out of breath even if they did nothing but lie on the bed, fully clothed, mouth to mouth. The act of him speaking was amusing, laughable compared to _this,_ reluctant; to form a separate thought to be communicated to the other, to be divided even this much. 

“I imagine it balances out, eventually. Fades. It...hasn’t been like this before,” Qui-Gon murmured, rubbing his face slowly against Obi-Wan’s stubble, a big cat like gesture. < _This is new. > _

_“Not like this before.” Only with me. There hasn’t been anyone else, not like this._ The joy turned wild, fierce, into something he knew a Jedi couldn’t afford. He released it after a few deep breaths, felt acknowledgement and fleeting wistfulness from the other side of the bond before they were released too.

< _I_ _may keep it. > _He answered, and he didn’t even knew he could sound like that in the Force, choking. 

The separation between their presences grew naturally after that, the Force nudging them gently, saying that too much of a good thing could be dangerous, and they should be moderate. It resulted in the more controlled breathing exercises and relinquishment. Their movements stilled and their voices quieted, until they lay motionless, once again divided entities. 

The light had grown gradually in the room, the mists almost a memory now, transient and rare from the beginning.

When Qui-Gon, eyes serious, raised his hand and traced Obi-Wan’s face carefully, and then dropped it to his waist, starting to open the sash with big, nimble fingers, it was, at first, simply a chase after something that was inexorably fading. Then his fingers were under Obi-Wan's tabards and tunics, splayed on his stomach, and Obi-Wan's breath hitched. This was a different kind of unlearning, to allow himself to become all of his bodily reactions and responses, like a moment ago he had been all mind. 

“Missed you,” he murmured, finally finishing the unsaid dreams from long ago. He wasn’t even sure what he referred to; they had been bodily separated for a long time, yes, but the merging had left him feeling empty, reaching in a way unbecoming of Jedi. 

“Gods, yes,” Qui-Gon muttered, and the hands moved, removing Obi-Wan’s clothes on their way up, and came to rest on his bare chest, warm and firm. Obi-Wan’s already once calmed breathing quickened under those hands, and he moaned when Qui-Gon’s mouth found an exposed nipple. It had never occurred to him before Qui-Gon that he was so sensitive there, not until the altering bites and soothing, torturously slow licks had him bucking into the larger man’s weight, head thrown back. 

“I have got more knobs, you know _,”_ Obi-Wan bit out, a bit tartly, when Qui-Gon showed no sign of moving on. Qui-Gon’s laugh was unrestricted, boisterous thing in the Force still heaving around them, and with it, the pricks of pain re-emerged - in Qui-Gon’s larynx and sternum and, more surprisingly, in his inner ears, Obi-Wan’s heightened awareness of the other told him. It stilled them both. 

They took the opportunity to part a little to put their clothes aside. Obi-Wan’s stomach twisted for losing the physical nearness, no matter how temporarily, and he felt quite silly before he noticed the small flinch as Qui-Gon quenched his body’s discomfort. 

< _No more talking for you, or I call an end to this, > _ Obi-Wan sent, aiming for a stern tone. < _This isn’t worth your pain. > _The emptiness inside him hissed disappointedly, but it was the easiest thing to ignore. 

_ <A conscious decision, joy of my heart. You bring out all these things I thought were lost. I want them fully.> _

Obi-Wan’s cheeks heated at the gently teasing endearment. He wasn’t sure what made him long for them, revel in them, collect them so close; perhaps it was the intimacy they suggested, the assumed _no one else, not like this._

He also knew Qui-Gon was trying to distract him. 

_ <I won’t have you hurting.> _

_ <I’ll be careful from now on, if you wish for it. I don’t mind the temporary inconvenience.> _With that statement, the last clothes were shed to the floor without care.

Obi-Wan swallowed and looked aside before he remembered the present moment, only now taking in their surroundings, the privacy of them; in the previous years, he had entered the master bedroom only rarely, usually when Qui-Gon was badly injured or he was in search of something particular from the room. He had had sideway glances from the slightly open door of course; the swish of night robes and the soft glow of the bedside lamp, indicating a late night reading. But Qui-Gon, standing in the middle of now completely sun-filled room, naked as the day he was born, tall, muscular, strong thighs and graying chest hair, smiling his crooked half-smile, was intimacy beyond his imagination. The heat spread from Obi-Wan’s cheeks to all over his body. They looked at each other. Between them, the Force swelled, not dissolving like before, but carrying flashes of memories and sensations.

In his hand, sweat and slicked friction, Obi-Wan himself jerking upwards, gasping, eyes closed. _ <Beautiful.> _The heat found a new course in his body, pooling in his gut, and his cock suddenly remembered the strokes, filling and raising. Qui-Gon’s eyes flashed darker in the bright room. On his face, something so unfamiliar it took a second for Obi-Wan to identify: hunger.

The embrace was a collision really, neither man knowing who moved first, who kissed whom as they fell on the bed. 

Skin against the skin after months was a jolt of shock. 

Qui-Gon was so frigging _tall,_ Obi-Wan thought dazedly.He had so much to explore, to wind himself around; vague thoughts, of kissing and tasting every inch, travelling from calves to flanks, from the concurrently cursed and blessed scar to shoulders, flashed across his mind, the acts relishing, meditative. < _Later, > _ came Qui-Gon’s low growl in the Force. < _We have time for that later. > _

_ <What, no centering excersises meditating the here and now?> _Obi-Wan teased.

_< Part of being the here and now, my imp of a knight, is recognizing what your frame of mind allows in that moment. Do you think we> \- _strong hands manhandling him suddenly, turning him with the aid of the Force, his head hitting the familiar smelling pillow - < _are capable of > _\- parting of his legs, something long and thick and hot settling against his own cock, tantalizing, and he wrapped his legs around Qui-Gon’s waist and made a choked noise, just in case the other man even _thought_ of retreating further away - < _meditative? I can try, if you wish. > _Slow, sinuous roll of hips, pushing them both forward, the headboard creaking unmistakably.

“Don’t you dare!” It was Obi-Wan’s turn to growl, the brushes and slide of skin contact driving him to distraction.He raised his hands and pulled closer wherever he could, broad shoulders, biceps, strands of hair falling down between them, close but not enough, not _merged._

Qui-Gon muffled his laugh on Obi-Wan’s clavicle. It turned into a smothered groan, louder in the Force, when Obi-Wan didn’t stop their movement but took charge, raised his hips and pushed. A shudder ran through the large body, miming Qui-Gon’s Force presence, which had returned to its restless searching after their coalescence. It wasn’t as disconcerning as it had been when Qui-Gon had just woken up, but Qui-Gon was normally unshakeable, a weight of serenity and warm reassurance in the Force, and this...this rustling, this endlessly mutating shades of green against Obi-Wan’s heightened consciousness, this was unheard of his former master. 

“Find it in me. With me,” was out of his mouth, gasped really, before he had time to think, but Qui-Gon understood his intention. Obi-Wan was suddenly intensely grateful of the bright daylight; in the dark, he would have missed the simmering in Qui-Gon’s eyes when he raised his head and looked at him, he wouldn’t have witnessed the surprise melting into an unbearable gentleness around Qui-Gon’s mouth.

It hit him again, these intimacies, as Qui-Gon reached out for the nightstand and reappeared with the small tube of lube. Of course he had been aware of possibilities as a padawan, but as much as in each other’s pockets they had lived during his apprenticeship, these things had been an untangled, unacknowledged mess, and the merest hint had them turning their gazes. Now Qui-Gon was arranging two plush pillows under Obi-Wan’s hips. He knew these pillows, they had acquired them after the mission on Hgreth III, when it had been impossible for Qui-Gon to sleep in any other position than on his right side. He had never thought of what happened to them afterwards. He knew this thick, tickling wool blanket underneath him, it was a gift from Tahl.

The change in his position, how his legs fell open, made him feel oddly uncovered. Qui-Gon’s presence was around him, not the same as it had been but still undeniably Qui-Gon again. An image transferred in the Force; the sun playing in his longer hair and stubble, copper catching fire, the three moles on his shoulder which Qui-Gon wanted to bite and bite and bite, his chin held high, eyes blown wide and dark green and expectant in the front of a new challenge. Obi-Wan under him, legs spread open, challenging. 

< _You can’t possibly fathom how much - > _

< _I do. Come here. > _

Qui-Gon closed his eyes, very briefly, and then his weight was on Obi-Wan, grounding, solidifying, like somebody had nailed the planet’s axis back into its proper place and the whole damn rock wasn’t in danger of hurtling out of its orbit anymore. 

It took a long time, Qui-Gon being careful and so slow he was surely driving Obi-Wan mad, but at last there were two calloused, powerful fingers inside him, inch by inch, stretching, sending small shocks of electricity up his spine. Obi-Wan knew distantly that he had spread his legs even wider at some point, to allow better access, his thighs quivering as he strained against those fingers, pushed them deeper, his moans continuous now, but none of it mattered except that the wonderful intrusion wouldn’t end. Qui-Gon was raining kisses on his stomach, on the tip of Obi-Wan’s cock, everywhere he could reach. Obi-Wan felt the search, the intention from somewhere far away, and then the white, roaring fire burned its way through him, leaving him hoarse.

_ <Gods. You. You’re from the dream.> _

“ _Not_ a dream, I swear by the Force if this is the dream I’ll punch you so hard you wake u--ahhh!” His rambling didn’t make any sense, _he_ didn’t make any sense, but even that didn’t matter, because he was in the only place in the whole Galaxy where he could let of control, could let himself go. Gods, months and months of being only knight Kenobi, and he was finally Obi-Wan again.

< _Giving me this, so good, so beautiful. > _

< _Come on, come on, come on, don’t make me beg - > _

Something possessive answered him in the Force, something that could never exist outside this bed, and it had Obi-Wan thrusting wildly and wordlessly. 

Taking Qui-Gon inside him was, above all else, calming. Obi-Wan was back where he belonged among all the worlds, as close as possible in the physical realm. Belonging was, of course, fleeting at best for a Jedi, but he intended to spend all his moments of joy between duties right here. Qui-Gon took it all in, more than that, his Force presence embraced Obi-Wan, the mountain settling down from its shaking, finding its heart root.

Qui-Gon had closed his eyes tightly, biting his lip, a low, long moan escaping when he eased further and tried to control both acts of rerooting at once. 

< _D_ _on’t fight it. I’ll protect it. Allow us to heal, > _Obi-Wan breathed into the Force, barely believing that he was getting this too, to keep. But Qui-Gon didn’t retreat, didn’t recoil; instead he slid in, fulfilling and kriffing big, until they rested in each other, Obi-Wan’s legs bent backwards.

< _All this time, you have been better with us than me. I trust you with us from now on, my love. > _He could feel Qui-Gon giving up the fear, the hiding, the heart root growing and settling for good.

What happened between their bodies, the push, pull, regaining, was echoed in the Force, the boundaries unnecessary. Qui-Gon’s hand on Obi-Wan’s cock, pulling in the rhythm of his thrusts, twisting near the base in a way he knew Obi-Wan liked. He was pulsing around Qui-Gon’s cock, and Qui-Gon’s rhythm was altering, becoming irregular and snapping. Then there was no more emptiness inside him; he was so full everything burst into light. 

***

“They won’t keep us together. Ours isn’t the shared duty when they see this bond, only shared, intermittent joy.”

“Pity them then, Obi-Wan, because they don’t have a home to return to in the Galaxy as we do. It doesn’t matter if we return to it only rarely; it will be here.”

The joy of knowing, naming, claiming, barely bearable in their luminosity and impermanence. They slept; mingled breath, mingled sweat, mingled sheets, mingled minds. 


	7. Chapter 7

Epilogue 

**Two months later**

Anakin sat on the edge of the training mat. He had only just become aware of his mouth hanging open in astonishment (“Fly trap, Ani,” his mother would admonish him; the thought hurt less than before). A small solace was that he had time to snap it shut as his master had emerged on the other side of the salle, and he didn’t end up looking like a complete fool.

Anakin had always dismissed soresu in all his saber training classes. It sounded cowardly, not worthy of a true knight. He had to swallow his words now, and he had never liked that. The performing of kata - although he knew it wasn’t for him, or for any other beings lingering as an audience, but for the two participants and the Force alone - was making him feeling the oddest thing.

He was happy for them. Of course he had been happy for other people before, many times; but in the past, it had always been an effort, something his mother had said they should practice, for all the Galaxy’s good luck wasn’t placed in some sort of cosmic scale. There had been a hunger gnawing at him every time, hunger for good things for himself and for everybody who were treated unfairly _,_ and hunger for the means to get them, the means to punish those who had taken the luck and unbalanced the fair scale.

But now he was simply happy for master Qui-Gon and master Obi-Wan. They were here, they were with him - each of them had taken a time with him on the mat earlier - and the bond between them was something Anakin knew he didn’t understand yet, bright and aching and appealing. He could simply feel happy for them, that they had found this shiny, curious thing, which the distance and time apart didn’t seem to affect. The feeling was carried to him by the Force. It was the easiest thing he had felt or done in a long time. 

Obi-Wan was leading, implying that the knight had studied the kata further than the master. Obi-Wan was a shining shield in the Force, impermeable and relentless. Master Qui-Gon followed in perfect sync, regal and leonine and not a bit cowed. The speech amplifier lay near at Anakin’s feet; Qui-Gon didn’t often bother with it at the Temple, especially when he spent days in the Archives with master Depa. Obi-Wan had been among the first to answer the Council’s Call, but his return from the solitary mission had taken some time. 

In the quieter moments of the kata, when the hum of sabers died down, Anakin could hear one breathing of two men; the time apart didn’t show on their movements or on their faces. They were immersed in the kata and in each other - although Anakin suspected he was the only one present who actually saw the latter, no matter how out in the open masters Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were.

There was a deceptive simplicity in their synchronized movements, quietness and grace Anakin suspected he - as perceptive as the Force sometimes allowed him to be in some things - couldn’t have seen or appreciated some mere months ago.

His master came to stand next to him as Anakin rose to his feet, master Mace’s face unreadable. Anakin wasn’t sure if master Mace appreciated what he saw - and he saw the same as Anakin, Anakin had no doubt of _that_ \- but for some reason he didn’t straightforwardly disapprove of it either. If anything, he felt guarded in the Force, expectant. 

“There’s somebody I would like you to meet, padawan,” he told Anakin quietly. “Her ship arrives to the eastern J-terminal in half an hour. Go get cleaned up and meet me and master Billaba there. Be presentable.”

Anakin nodded gravely. His master felt...anticipatory? That wasn’t something he let out in the open, usually, much less in the public, where he was always stern. As they parted ways, Anakin heading to the sonics, he was sure neither man on the mat noticed. He hunched his shoulders.

He could be happy. He was happy. But the hunger was there, underneath everything. He hoped his master - any of his masters, really - wouldn’t find it out just yet. He wanted to be better than that. He wanted to show them all that he was better than that.

And master Obi-Wan had said that trying was everything.

***

Something was definitely going on. Master Billaba’s hair had this complex looking hairdo instead of her usual two braids; Anakin knew his master’s robes were from his ‘better’ closet. He started to chew on his lower lip, noticed master Depa’s eye twitch, and stopped and positioned his hands in front of him the way she had taught him. 

< _Master? > _he whispered through their bond. The bond between them was an odd thing, Anakin had decided, reminding him of quicksilver. While always strong, it didn’t seem to settle into a definite shape; sometimes closed off, his master almost unreachable, other times, quite often, open and overflowing, sloshing everywhere, and Anakin could reach his master as easily as he breathed. Master Mace could control it to a certain extent, definitely much better than he could, but even he couldn’t seem to make it calm down completely. 

< _Everything is alright. Calm yourself. > _

The spaceship docking on the other end of the terminal did nothing to snuff out his curiousness (he wasn’t nervous, no matter what master Depa said). It was old, ancient in fact in Coruscanti terms, a model long ago removed from the Jedi squadron.

The being descending the landing ramp was one of the strangest Anakin had encountered, and he was ready to admit that his horizons had been broadened a lot during the last few months. He distantly remembered master Themeika’s voice fading into obscurity as his mind had focused on a problem with Artoo’s latest update. 

A plant based life form. A tree-sentient Jedi. But they were, like, super rare weren’t they? Wizard! She was commanding the whole hangar only with her presence; Anakin could have sworn he heard the mechanics’ backbones snapping to attention as she glided towards them.

Then both his master and master Billaba bowed, sweeping, reverent and deep. The tiniest squeak escaped him; what he was expected to do, if master Depa and his own, unrelenting, high-ranking master were behaving this way? Maybe he should kneel?

Who _was_ she?!

He bowed hastily. 

“Grandmaster,” master Depa intoned, the tiniest hint of peals of laughter in her voice, a clue Anakin had learned to search in these past months. Anakin suddenly hoped he had knelt down, because wow the planet spun _fast._ His master’s master?! This otherworldly, taller-than-his-master, imperious being? Gah, he should have been more meticulous at the sonics! How master Obi-Wan did it, how he was so neat and proper all the time, Anakin should pester him to teach him that!

  


“Padawan of my padawan,” she answered, her voice full of the rustle of leaves and all the wonderful, mossy, very slowly growing things. She extended her bark-covered...hand? branch?...placed it under master Depa’s chin and raised her head, and they smiled at each other. 

“Master,” master Windu stated as calmly, straightening his back.

“Padawan,” the tree Jedi purred, and how could her voice sound like the feeling Anakin got when he ran his hand on the moss in the Room of Thousand Fountains? “Still running yourself ragged. You need real sunlight and running in the jungle.”

“I’m treading in a jungle far more dangerous than Harun Kal’s every day, master,” master Mace quipped, and Anakin nearly swallowed his tongue, because who was this slightly playful imposter standing in his stern master’s stead? The regal Jedi laughed, an odd sound deep from her throat, like a buzz of bees. Her branch-hand actually _flipped_ Anakin’s master’s nose very gently and very fast before she stepped forward and hugged master Mace, who returned the embrace a bit stiffly.

“And who is this Little Sun?” the tree Jedi asked after she and master Mace retreated from their greeting, and she turned her yellow-green eyes at Anakin. Anakin discovered where master Mace had inherited his penetrating gaze. 

“Master T’ra Saa, let me introduce you to my new padawan, Anakin Skywalker.” Out of nowhere, master Mace’s hand was on his shoulder, and Anakin was grateful and a little ashamed that he needed it in the first place. He couldn’t act like a scared little kid. He bowed again, with more grace this time, he liked to think, and willed master Depa’s teachings into his mind.

“It is my utmost pleasure, reverend grandmaster,” he uttered, and not a muscle moved on master Depa’s face, but he just _knew_ she was amused.

Master T’ra Saa’s thin lips actually twitched - she didn’t even try to hide it, and Anakin bristled. So this how it was going to be, he was the butt of some joke he didn’t even understand. _Ego talking,_ someone whispered in his mind. Okay, that was super pompous, he admitted to himself, and forced himself to smile and shrug a little. Okay, so he couldn’t make everybody like him, so what. He just wished she wouldn’t turn out to be one of _them_.

“Such a bright Little Sun, despite growing in such a harsh soil before he came to us,” master T’ra Saa murmured. “The pleasure is all mine, padawan Skywalker,” she added, very gravely. “I see my padawan has listened to me about his life choices before I even had a chance to offer my sage advice this time.” 

Master Depa, perhaps sensing Anakin’s bewilderment, leapt smoothly into the conversation. “I didn’t think we could actually reach you with the Call, grandmaster. This is a most welcome surprise.” 

They started to walk away from the hangar, in that dignified, slow pace all the masters seemed to acquire with their status, and which, to Anakin, was like imitating a slug. How masters were ever anywhere on time?

“A Call for Home to the whole Order from the Head of the Order, with an encrypted code and widely tiered arriving times? You piqued my curiosity. I sensed my grandpadawan’s handprint on this from parsecs away, dearheart.” Master Depa inclined her head gracefully. 

“We have received an unique warning from the Force. Coruscant is compromised, master. We don’t yet know how, and we don’t yet know who. Whatever it is, it’s strong enough to shroud us in our everyday state. The Council has decided that the whole Order needs to stand united in search of the answer,” master Mace lowered his voice, even though they weren’t in public anymore.

The yellow-green eyes opened leisurely, with a dangerous glint. “Well. It has been some time since we dug into the Coruscant underbelly for your education, padawan. This will be _interesting._ ”

Anakin decided she wasn’t one of _them,_ after all, and that he quite liked his new, _own_ grandmaster. He lost track of the conversation for a moment, while he imagined adventures in this seething, life-exuding city, fighting bad guys alongside the magnificent tree Jedi master, his master and master Depa. His grandmaster’s odd laugh drew him from his holo-series dreaming. 

“Are you actually telling me, Mace, that with Little Sun here, my lineage and Yoda’s have joined in something that hasn’t been practised in centuries? The troll must have had an aneurysm.” 

Yeah, Anakin definitely liked her.

*** 

**Later?**

_Forward_ , said the Force.

He was sure at first that he had misunderstood. Forward? What was forward, anymore, in the aether, in the Force?

_Forward_ , it commanded again, but this time, it was gentle, in a way Ben couldn’t quite fully remember, just bits and flashes and pieces from his boyhood years, before his apprenticeship. 

Luke’s smile, wide and full of Light, _that_ he remembered. Luke was on...on the moon of Endor now. Celebrating. Mourning. Victorious. Deeply saddened. Lighting other little lights in the wasteland.

How many contradictions it was possible to fit into a person while they were still alive? His state of being was much more straightforward.

He drifted for a while. Nothing to do anymore. What a foreign, terrifying concept in death. 

_Forward. Someone’s waiting,_ said the Force. 

He went, because the Force told him to, and he had always bent to its will.

Someone there, for...him? 

_ <Padawan. You did well. So well. _

  
_I’m so sorry. Let me watch over your rest, that’s all I’ll ever ask. You can rest as long as you want. Then we can tell each other_ **_everything._** _> _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everybody who has stuck with this story until the end. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 
> 
> antheia. I am so grateful.


End file.
